Not Every Wright at Every Joe

 It occurs to me that I have been remiss in not urging my loyal reader (Hi, Mom!) to go over to the girly-site EveryJoe and read and comment on some of my columns there.

I mean no disrespect to my loyal reader (Hi, Mom!) but I have fallen into the habit of posting any thoughts on more sober topics there, where I can get paid for it, rather than here. I will not cease posting columns here, but my time is limited, so you may not get all the John C Wrightarian goodness you crave if you only read my content here.

Not every column I write is here, some are there.

Unfortunately, the only commenter who regularly comments multiple times on each column is a lying-ass heckler with whom I have, alas, in an unmanful fashion, lost all patience. A man can be told that he is a genocidal hate-filled hater only so many times before he either turns to prayer or turns to anger, and I did not turn to prayer.

So, as a courtesy to me, if anything I have ever written pleased you, kind reader, click through the links and leave a comment.

Here are my more recent columns:

 

The Perfect World: Where Would You Want to Live?

Civilization, as Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian can point out, is irksome and hidebound. It has rules and restrictions. Any civilized man must answer why he puts up with these rules, rather than, as every refined gentleman daydreams at least once, ripping off one’s clothing, slinging Jane over one’s brawny shoulder, and scampering into the wild jungle.

The utopia is the expression of the ideal civilization: the best answer, the goal. A utopia is a civilization without rules, a wild civilization, encompassing the best of both. Hence, answering what utopia we’d want to live in tells us ours inner justification for civilization. It betrays our worldview.

I submit that there are only three basic worldviews. Every other view is a variation of these: the Christian, the Hedonist, and the Stoical. This is because there are only three parts to the soul: the conscience, the passions, and the reason. (Or, if you prefer, the superego, the id, and the ego.)

Political Correctness Rots the Brain

In this column and the two following, I propose that Political Correctness rots the brain, and that brainrot in turn will rot the heart, which in turn will rot the soul. A corruption of thought and reason leads to the corruption of the poetic imagination and passions, and this in turn leads to the corruption of the philosophical and moral faculties.

In none of this is the Political Corrector a victim or a helpless waif: as deliberately as a drug addict puts a needle to his arm, as deliberately as an aficionado of Russian Roulette puts a revolver to his temple, he rots his own brain deliberately, and his heart, and his soul.

And what is the source and origin of all this rottenness? Ah, it all starts with a very small thing.

This is no surprise. The greatest things often turn on the smallest things.

We know from history that the Hessian Colonel at Trenton on the fateful Christmas Eve was found dead after the battle, with the courier’s message warning him that Washington was crossing the Delaware that night unopened in his pocket. We know from proverbs about the lost nail that loses a horseshoe, a rider, a battle, and a kingdom. We know from fables and ancient lore how Psyche lighting a small lamp, or Pandora opening a small box, or Eve plucking a small apple, have consequences too large for words.

Likewise, in the practical and pragmatic field of political economics, the mightiest branches of misery and holocaust, gulag and mass-death, grow from the mustard seed of questions interesting only to pedants.

In this case, the smallest thing from which these great issues of social misery spread is the pedantic question of whether words have meaning.

Political Correctness Rots the Heart

Political Correctness, albeit animated by a spirit that hates commerce and capitalism, thrives and is aided by the impulse toward arbitrary and inappropriate and illogical free-association of images of sex and power. To persuade inattentive marks to purchase their products, advertisers merely juxtapose one image with another: a healthy cowboy with an unhealthy cigarette, a nubile nymph next to a cold metal car, a comic polar bear sipping a soft drink. Such arbitrary mixing of images can only be taken seriously by populations whose poetic imaginations are utterly corrupt.

By the poetic imagination, I mean that faculty in man which makes and apprehends metaphors and archetypes (particularly those literal metaphors called words and ideas) and associates those metaphors to their proper emotions and passions.

Unfortunately, while the faculty seems instinctive, it is not. Like the conscience, it must be trained and domesticated in order to render the young fit for civilization.

It is not natural (that is, not instinctive) for a boy to feel it is sweet and decorous to die for the ashes of the fathers and the altars of the gods; but this must be inculcated into him, along with a sense of honor that forbids him to steal even when he is hungry and even when no one is looking. Otherwise, in a land of no patriots where all theft is licit, the soldiers will not march and the workingmen will not work.

Poetry, when it is licit, is the attempt to train the young imagination to prefer fit and decent metaphors and images, and to have the decent and apt emotional reactions to objects, concepts and events he may encounter. It is unnatural for the youth to react to every image of fatherhood and authority with jeering and defiance, and therefore the poetical imagery which portray all fathers, literal or figurative, as buffoons and tyrants in order to train the imagination of the young so that this seems normal, is likewise unnatural. See the nearest Disney cartoon for an example of fathers either buffoonish or tyrannous.

The young must be taught to love the beautiful, the just, and the good, and to hate what is ugly, unjust, and corrupted.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/10/08/politics/political-correctness-rots-the-heart-cultural-marxism/#ixzz3JUWB7zrR

Political Correctness Rots the Soul

Philosophy would be impossible without the soul. Animals do not contemplate abstractions, and are not ravished by contemplating the elegance proofs nor the beauty of the hidden laws of the universe.

The soul in an innocent and uncorrupted state is naturally inclined to philosophy. Note how often children ask “why?” It is the simplest question, yet the most philosophical. To ask why is to ask the reason for things, the meaning, the purpose, for what sake the universe exists.

It is the one question Political Correctness hates most of all, and seeks to silence. In the unspoken assumptions behind Political Correctness, it is taken for granted that the universe has only two parts: a lawless blind willpower ruling human minds, and an unwilling blind matter ruling the material universe.

This worldview eliminates the question “why?” It eliminates questions of honor and honesty. There is no such thing as honor to the utterly unhindered will, nor is there any such thing as honesty in reference to the blind and meaningless raw material of matter.

There is no answer to the question “why?” in a meaningless universe of matter occupied by egotists possessed of unbridled and totally arbitrary willpower. The only answer is either “that is just the way it is” or “because I said so.”

If the universe is nothing but the blind yet godlike willpower and the blind void of empty matter, there is no room for the poetic imagination nor for the trained conscience. There is no room for honor or honesty. And, as I fear we shall soon see, no room for civilization.

And there is no room for the soul.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/10/15/politics/political-correctness-rots-soul/#ixzz3JUW29E8L

The Unreality Principle: Civilization Gone Mad

Civilizations go mad just as men do.

A man goes mad not when his thoughts are false. Everyone has at least some false-to-facts belief. A man goes mad when he loses the faculty that corrects for errors. The faculty he uses to keep his mind trotting on the narrow bridle path of reality is broken: his thoughts no longer answer to the bridle and bit of reason, but run wildly, spitting foam, and carry him not where he wants to go.

A man goes mad when he no longer has the ability to compare the picture in his mind with the world around him, and correct the picture to conform it to the world. Instead he develops a faculty to explain away inconvenient facts. This is what paranoid delusions are: elaborate structures of excuses justifying his contempt for facts and hatred of them.

A madman has no power to correct his falsehoods. They rule him, he does not rule them.

Every civilization is based on a certain number of shared ideas and ideals, what can rightly be called the spirit of the civilization. These ideas and ideals are rarely debated and decided explicitly: they are more like the terms of an unspoken social contract. They are a consensus of the expectations and mutual obligations binding the social order together.

A civilization goes mad not when the ideas and ideals forming its spirit are false. Every society tells itself at least some myths to justify the pains of shouldering the burden of civilized behavior. A civilization goes mad when the faculty which would otherwise bring the ideas back to reality is broken.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/10/22/politics/unreality-principle-civilization-gone-mad/#ixzz3JUVuPnKq

The Unreality Principle: Loyalty to Lunacy

Recently in this space, we have discussed the Unreality Principle, which is the moral principle governing Leftist thought and discourse. In a word, it is the principle that if something in Leftist thinking is false, the Leftist believes it because it is false, not despite the falsehood.

And he is more proud and more unwavering in his loyalty to the false belief the more absurd and more obviously false it is.

And, likewise, if something is true, it must be denounced as false, and the more obviously and patently true it is, the more vehement must be the denunciation.

There are two senses in which the Unreality Principle operates: one is in the abstract, the other is in the concrete.

The abstract application of the Unreality Principle in embodied in the seven basic bogus ideas of the Left, previously discussed in this space.

There are abstract or philosophical ideas which are not merely false, but blatantly false, as if proud of their falsehood:

  • Solipsism — the paradox that asserts that truth is personal, hence optional: “It is not true that truth is true.”
  • Relativism — the paradox that asserts that virtue is subjective, situational, relative: “It is wrong for you to judge right and wrong.”
  • Subjectivism — the paradox that asserts that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as if ugliness could be made more beautiful than beauty by an act of will.
  • Irrationalism — the paradox that asserts reason is untrustworthy, therefore it is unreasonable to trust reason. Such is the reasoning.
  • Pervertarianism — the paradox that asserts it to be licit to seek the gratifications of sexual union of the reproductive act without the union, without the reproduction, and, in the case of sodomites, without the act.
  • Totalitarianism — the paradox that asserts that freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength. Making the state larger, more powerful, less answerable to the people somehow helps the people.
  • Nihilism — the paradox of that the meaning of life is that it has no meaning

In every case, each one of these seven bad ideas not only is useless as a picture of reality, it contradicts itself in what can only be called an insolent fashion: flipping the bird at reason, logic, and common sense.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/10/29/politics/leftists-unreality-loyalty-to-lunacy/#ixzz3JUVlY1DB

Left Wing, Right Wing, Buffalo Wing

Our current system of political labels is bunk.

The traditional Left-to-Right spectrum goes from violent Marxists on the Far Left, to Fabians and Euro-socialists on the Near Left.

In the middle, called Moderate, are moderate socialists and ‘mixed economy’ types who believe in a moderate amount of tyranny and rather moderate liberty. They believe arbitrary despotism can coexist with limited government. They believe that charismatic dictators using the laws to play favorites and grant exemption to political allies can coexist and cooperate with the rule of law. The Moderates believe in freedom and the free market except when it does not suit them, whereupon they call for Caesar to intervene. Wage and price controls, Keynesian bullshit, rationing and shortages, and minute regulation via unelected and anonymous bureaucrats are the hallmarks of the Moderate.

Next, on the Near Right, allegedly live that tribe of chimera, so often talked about in left-wing circles but rarely seen (until, ironically, Leftists gain power) who attempt to use government power to make sweetheart deals with big business, to indulge in corporate welfare, crony capitalism, and so on. This is a welfare state run for the benefit of the rich. Let me coin the term Plutocratic Socialist to describe this.

I realize that the term Plutocratic Socialist sounds like a paradox, but it is not. Technically speaking, welfare for the rich is rightly called socialism, since it holds all property to be available for looting by the state, that is, all property is common property, and it is a plutocracy since the state is run by and for the benefit of the big-government-big-money elite.

Whether the businessmen are corrupting the politicians by bribing them or the politicians are extorting loot from the businessmen is a moot point: the group enjoys a homogeny of outlook and a mutuality of interest.

The only real world example of a state run this way, before Obama’s America, before the nationalization of motor car industry, the school loan industry, the mortgage industry, and the medical insurance industry, was, it should come as no surprise, Mussolini’s Italy. Technically, this form of government is called fascism, but that word has long since be etiolated of any real meaning, so I use it cautiously. One thing it is not, is a free market system.

To the far Right resides a violent form of fascism. This breed of fascist are all in favor of socialism, from public insurance to public education to wage and price controls to the subjugation of all trade and industry to military discipline, but who want to use these alleged benefits of socialist control for the nation, rather than for the proletarian. They are known at National Socialist, or Nazis.

Got that? The political spectrum left to right is: Stalinist socialist, Fabian socialist, halfhearted-socialist, fascist socialist and national socialist.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/11/05/politics/political-labels-left-wing-right-wing-buffalo-wing/#ixzz3JUVTq8FE

The Windrose of Reality

In our last episode, we saw that the traditional Left-to-Right and Radical-to-Conservative spectrum is confusing and dishonest. It is confusing because it defines all political positions based on their degree of opposition to sick Leftist utopian daydreams, and dishonest because it lumps all opponents to daydreaming together, totalitarians and monarchists and semi-anarchists alike, regardless of the motive for the opposition, regardless of whichever of many varied (and often antithetical) political theories the partisan might prefer to sick utopia.

The real difference is the Right believes that we can agree to disagree. The Left doesn’t agree to that.

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/11/12/politics/replace-political-labels-with-the-windrose-of-reality/