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Thursday, July 6, 2017

The Triumph of Lunacy and the Creation of a Counter-Reality

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A few writers and pundits have begun to notice it, but even their comments cannot encompass or fully express what has happened intellectually to our society, to our present-day politics, and to our culture. At least one third, perhaps many more, of the citizens of our nation apparently live in a parallel universe, with its own set of foundational beliefs, its own standards of truth and narrative of facts. This universe in almost every respect represents the aggressive contrary, the negation, of the inherited, rooted principles on which our historic Western and Christian civilization is based. This “other” reality, this paradigm, did not all of a sudden just spring up or just appear, it has been cultivated and nurtured for centuries. Its creating philosophers understood that their operational premises and desired objectives ran up full force against the ingrained traditions and historic legacy of a culture and civilization that traced its origins not only to the beliefs of the ancient Hebrews, but also to the highest art and philosophy and statecraft of the Greeks and of Rome.

 


The conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the First Councilof Nicaea (325 A.D.) recognized the primacy of Divine Positive Law in both the East and the West. But not only that: the transformation signaled the explicit foundation of Europe based not only on Revelation, but also upon the reality of Natural Law, those rules inscribed in nature that also have as their Author, God Himself. That transformation of ancient society was conservative in the best sense of that word. For the Christian civilization that came about was built securely and firmly on the traditions and the legacy of those ancient cultures that were not actually destroyed by the Faith, but fulfilled and completed by it.

Is this template not the exact opposite of that of the modernist, progressivist Revolution?

While the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans sought to measure and eventually comport their societies in harmony with Revelation and with what they viewed around them, the observable and revealed laws of nature—the Natural Law, the eternal Revolutionaries not only wish to overthrow the Commandments of God (or at least subvert them), but to overawe and suspend nature.

The Revolutionaries tell us that they strive for “freedom,” “liberation from restraints,” for “liberty.” But their program—their revolution—turns liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves millions in unrequited passions and desire, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English Catholic essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of real lunacy.

In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?”

He responds, in part:

“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return…. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [Italics added] Our modern revolutionaries, whether out in the streets demonstrating like wailing banshees, or nightly broadcasting ideological pablum they call news, or parading before a Senate committee (or on that committee!), or indoctrinating gullible, nearly soul-less students in supposed “centers of higher education,” are, to use Chesterton’s parable, lunatics: men “already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.

Theirs is the orthodoxy of cultural Marxism that, despite all its farrago of “defeating racism, sexism, homophobia, and white oppression,” and establishing equality all round, is ultimately unachievable, an exercise in destructive lunacy. And thus its proponents are, measured by the reality of thousands of years of our Christian civilization and by the laws of nature, insane.

This is all the more true when we examine in more detail some of the current figures of the Revolution, some of its programed and insane “foot soldiers.”

Three days before the attempted assassination of Congressional Republicans by James Hodgkinson in Alexandria, Virginia, a columnist for The Huffington Post, Jason Fuller, published an essay (it has now been taken down). The HuffPost is what we would call “mainstream Left.” It conveys views that are quite common among leading politicians, and its writers have appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and at other sites.

That’s what makes this serious.

Fuller spins an hysterical web of charges against not just the president but everyone in his administration, and also various members of Congress. They have, in his mind, all committed “treason,” and thus they must all be tried, convicted, and taken out and executed. He has already determined the verdict. For Fuller there is no doubt about the “Russian collusion” narrative. It’s a fact because he wants it to be a fact, and because for the past seven months the media and respected politicians have opened a Pandora’s Box of reckless insinuations and violent attacks, and created an immense mythic, politically poisonous narrative.

Jason Fuller’s desires to execute the president are representative of thousands, perhaps millions, of “resistance” people who inhabit that “parallel-universe.”

He—and Hodgkinson—are not isolated, they are identical in their thinking, tips of an iceberg cultivated and encouraged and abetted by those same political leaders and that same media who have propagated that pseudo-reality, and thus must stand accused of the vicious and virulent venom they have unleashed.

Or, take the case of Leftist Intelligence agent Miss Reality Winner (apparently her real name). She was arrested for violations of the Federal statute on leaking national intelligence secrets. Hers is the first of what we may hope to be a longer list of discovered culpable “leakers.” And she presents a classic textbook case of an unapologetic, zealous and unhinged, behind-thecomputer “lunatic” out to “destroy” President Trump, by whatever means.

Reason and common sense, restraint and civility, have nothing to do with her ideological moorings. She inhabits a different world.

It is, then, no exaggeration to state that millions of Americans are, to put it mildly, “insane” and made so by an infectious ideology that posits a mythical “counter-reality” which has poisoned their thinking and world view to the point that co-existing with them in the same nation, in the same geography, becomes increasingly difficult. Their template is highly aggressive and contagious; it must increase and grow, or it dies.

And, if resolutely opposed, if fights back viciously and with total war.

This is what we behold and see before us happening in our society in 2017.

Compromise with it is impossible, a sign of weakness that only emboldens it. To effectively oppose it, we must understand it, its methodology, and its goals. And then, in every facet of life and with God’s grace, oppose it unrelentingly, through our prayers and action. 

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Last modified on Wednesday, July 26, 2017
Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

Boyd D. Cathey, a native North Carolinia, received an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and served as assistant to conservative author, Dr. Russell Kirk, in Mecosta, Michigan. Recipient of a Richard M. Weaver Fellowship, he completed his doctoral studies at the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Then, after additional studies in philosophy and theology, he taught in both Connecticut and in Argentina, before returning to the United States. He served as State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives, retiring in 2011. He is the author of various articles and studies published in several different languages about political matters, religion, and culture and the arts.