Last Crusade 15: Crucifying the Truth
On this day, when infinite love clothed in living truth more brilliant that the sun, crowned with all virtues, descended into the finite sphere of Earth, and was greeted with indifference, jeers, hatred, humiliation, torture, and death, it behooves us to reflect on the nature of truth and mankind’s hatred of it.
This is a perennial defect of the human race. The hatred of truth is more enflamed in some men than in others, more in some nations and eras than others.
Now, hatred of truth is lauded as a virtue, truthfulness is blackened by many evil names, called extremism, partisanship, meanspiritedness, and love of truth is equated to terrorism. Truth is denounced as inappropriate, as bigotry, and as inciting violence.
Speaking truth is held to be as culpable as the physical violence it allegedly provokes, and for this reason trample truth with violence and the threat of violence is called laudable.
Truth makes moral cripples feel unsafe.
These feelings are not based in reality, but are held to carry more weight than reality carries. In schools and in life, places where the free words of free men are not to be tolerated, ironically called safe spaces, are erected to banish truth and crucify it.
And yet, oddly, even in the midst of their unparalleled victory, the corrupt lords of this world cannot relax and enjoy their ovations and triumphs.
Truth crucified has an uncomfortable habit of leaving the tomb where it was thought safely buried empty, and being seen again.
Even those who do not believe such resurrections are possible would be wise to hope, in these years now, that a supernatural revival might yet be seen. For without that hope, there can be no hope.
In this generation, phobic hatred of the truth has reached a paramount and unparalleled supremacy.
This generation is the first in all human history which embraces nihilism as its fundamental worldview and fundamental philosophy and fundamental thought. Nihilism is the worldview that says no worldview is right; nihilism is the philosophy that says no philosophy is right. Nihilism is the thought that stops thought.
You might think of a nihilist as one who wears black lipstick or a black turtleneck sweater, sitting in a café and smoking European cigarettes, bemoaning the joyless meaninglessness of life. It is a philosophical posture, namely, a theory of epistemology, which says that there are no overarching truths, no general truths, no real and solid truths, open to man. It is the metaphysical statement that all metaphysical statements are untrue.
Now, this is not a conclusion anyone reaches by any reasoning process, for it contradicts itself. Pointing out the contradiction has no effect on the devout nihilist; one cannot be reasoned out of a belief one was never reasoned into.
Nihilism is a logical halt-state, a dead-end from which there is no worldly means of escape: for no reasoning can be given to a man who reasons that all reasoning is vain. When a man prods out his eyes with his own thumbs, there is no sight to show him that will reveal to him that light is better than darkness. He can no longer see the light, even if he would.
If not by reason, how comes any man or any nation to embrace the hatred of truth as a paramount truth?
A central truth known since ancient days in the west is that evil is nothing.
An evil is a defect or a lapse in what otherwise would be whole and good. For example, the vice called recklessness is the virtue of courage combined with a defect of prudence. The vice called cowardice is the virtue of prudent self-interest combined with a defect of justice and a lack of manhood. Bigotry and partisanship are the virtues of philos, particular brotherly love, love for one’s tribe, clan, nation, race or party, combined with a lapse of justice or temperance, a defect of agape, universal or heavenly love, toward those fellow men beyond the bounds of party or tribe. Adultery is eros, romantic love, directed to an improper object in violation of sacred oaths of marriage. Even this sin, which shatters families and ruins lives and provokes murderer and murderess to bloody deeds, would be no sin if the couple were lawfully wed to each other.
And so on for any vice or sin one cares to name. If it were drawn as a picture, a vice would not be a blank page. It would be a portrait of an otherwise handsome face, with merely one feature out of true; a nose like a melon, fair lips eaten away with loathsome disease to reveal the teeth of the skull beneath, one eye thrice the diameter of the other, or some other malign feature or misproportion.
Imagine a villain in a story who lacks all the virtues Boy Scouts emulate. He would be untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, unkind, disobedient, morose, prodigal, cowardly, dirty, and impious. One thinks of Gollum from Tolkien or Mime from Wagner. Yet even these wretches are only a threat to the hero due to some virtue of thoughtful cunning, or long-suffering perseverance, which enables them to lead the hero into a spider’s lair, or to drink a poisoned draught.
Vice by itself is nothing. Vice is only dangerous when it bends some strong virtue to its twisted ends, and the stronger the virtue, the greater the danger.
The moral universe is arranged in a hierarchy of goods, with some elevated above others. Eating when one hungers is a good thing; human life is also a good thing. Eating one’s own children to sate a hunger is not a good thing, because it places a lesser good, the satisfaction of hunger, above a greater good, the preservation of human life, and a father’s duty to preserve his children.
For this reason, none of the haters of truth says he hates the truth. Perhaps the more unreflective souls among them are not even aware of their own stance and its implications, and would be surprised to hear themselves so named. In the same way that the advocates of prenatal infanticide never actually name the act they are defending, not even in their own thoughts, the hatred of truth is buried under a gibberish of euphemisms, misdirection, and nonsense-words.
Hence they cloak their love of dishonesty under a concern for some lesser thing. At times, truth is too harsh to be heard at weddings or festivities, or too harsh to be heard by a child. And so even a truthful man is tempted to be silent out of courtesy so as not to spoil festive levity, or a not to burden a child with weighty truths his tender years cannot shoulder.
Now, courtesy is also a thing that the modern generation loathes and despises, and it is ironic, to say the least, that any persons who harvest the organs of murdered unborn babies for the black market, or who support this practice, claim to have gentle feelings toward their own young. In the current generation, courtesy is banished in the name of some good still lesser yet, authenticity or a democratic ease of manners or spontaneity. In its place, the current generation erects Political Correctness, which brings courtesy into the political realm.
Nowadays, speaking a bad name to a minority or a woman is not a matter for a gentleman’s upbringing to upbraid in himself, or a gentleman’s fist in the mouth to correct in others. Instead, impolite speech is upbraided on the grounds that it forms the basis of a political evil called oppression or exploitation. This leads to naked absurdities, such as where criticizing a mulatto president occupying the most powerful office in the world for unwise corrupt abuse of the taxing power against political enemies is called oppression — not by him but of him.
Once the consensus of society gullibly swallows this absurdity, it is easy enough to rule all truths inconvenient to the self-esteem, political ambition, or mental disorders of those the consensus favors be likewise be impolite, hence an act of political oppression. The weasel word used for this is “inappropriate.”
The core of the nihilist, truth-hating philosophy of the modern generation is never to allow the truth or falsehood of anything to be debated nor discussed. But something, anything, must be said to allow the nihilists to shout down any truths spoken where anyone might hear. Having ruled out any discussion on the merits of the case, the only thing left is to impeach the witness giving testimony. From this springs all the nauseating and servile cult worship of experts and expertise which dominates the feverish brains of the modern thinkers and postmodern post-thinkers.
Now, keep in mind, the actual credentials of actual experts is never discussed, nor is their work examined nor their conclusions questioned. Instead, the motives of anonymous witnesses are trumpeted as being pure, and therefore worthy of credulity, and the motives of any witness for the opposition is subjected to slander in a wild cacophony of accusations rooted in nothing.
Karl Marx did not begin the practice of uttering false and unsubstantiated accusations against political opponents, nor of dismissing all differences of opinion as being no more than political oppositions in disguise; but he is the first, at least among influential writers, to make this a central stanchion of his philosophical system and worldview. Marxism has built into its foundations the accusation that all who oppose Marxism are motivated by class self-interest, false consciousness, or some other moral or mental defect.
Modern Political Correctness, which takes it major stream of thought from the fountainhead of Marx, codifies this same unconvincing sort of slander-instead-of-answer to respond to any criticism also into its foundation. It is an axiom of Political Correctness that no possible honest objection, even a mistaken one, can be voiced to Political Correctness. Its goodness and enlightenment are held to be too obvious to need any defense, clothed in the supernatural beauty of a truth that should make it self-evident. Only evil goblins, such as philosophers, Christians and Republicans believe otherwise, and this is due to various mental and moral shortcomings.
To disagree with Political Correctness is not taken as a sign of an independent mind waiting to be convinced by naked evidence, but as a sign of a soul reprobate and corrupt beyond the reach of words.
Now, the irony that Political Correctness rests on a foundation of metaphysical nihilism, that is, on the foundational belief that no solid truth exists for the mind of man to know, and that therefore any man claiming to know any truth is guilty of arrogance, special pleading, bigotry, or blind party-loyalty; and this foundation not only denies that self-evident truth exists, but any truth at all, obvious or subtle.
So the moderns do not and cannot argue a case. Many have never heard any issue argued in good faith in all their lives. Where would any hear such a debate, these days?
“Today the panel will be debating this question: Are all Trump supporters are irredeemable and deplorable bigoted racist Nazi mass-murdering knuckle-dragging Neanderthal subhumans who must never be allowed to speak in public? Here, speaking in public, is the moronic but bigoted extremist, Mr. Literally Hitler, whom we have invited here to be interrupted and shouted down by the panel. Mr. Hitler, how do you justify your rank and stinking evil?”
No one who has not been subject to one of these storms of slander and libel by major international newspapers is able to grasp or likely to believe the sheer magnitude of bile involved, or the utter lack of the slightest scruple either in the slanderer or his willing audience. They do not care about right and wrong, reason or rationality, and they have no shame. It is a raging mob, if a mob were too craven to face whom they slander in person. It is a mob of cowards.
What provokes their reckless hatred? Obviously it is not the unfortunate who is offered them as the victim of the day. Less than one out of a hundred in the mob would have even heard the name of whomever they are calling on today to be crucified. The priest does not know the name of the goat offered as the scapegoat. The real person does not matter to the mob, nor does reality matter.
It precisely to escape from reality that all this is done.
Why is the hatred so deep, so bitter, and why are the accusations so wild and meaningless?
This reason for the wildness of the accusations clear enough: if one is accused of something which may or may not be true, such as that you perched a dog on top of your car twenty years ago, then the matter is still within range of rational discussion. One can introduce facts to show whether this did or did not happen, and whether it was justified. But if someone accuses you of being a witch, or, better yet, someone accuses you of being a reactionary extremist, a four-sided triangle, or a Frumious Bandersnatch, or something else that cannot or does not exist, then discussion is impossible, for there is no evidence to produce, and no defense to raise.
There are no homophobes, and there are no Bandersnatches. No one in the history of the world actually suffered from an uncontrollable, psychopathic fear of unnatural sexual acts, and yet each time a decent man with wholesome tastes is called a ‘homophobe’ just this absurd falsehood is promoted.
Like accusing someone of being a witch, it is an accusation issued not because anyone earshot is likely to think it true. It is ceremonial, a thing done for its own sake. It is erected as a banner on a staff for all those loyal to this season’s latest fashion in immorality disguised as piety to salute. It is not prompted by any pity for those who suffer same-sex attraction, for those who pity such folk hate the Muslim law and the Muslims who follow it, calling for the death of homosexuals. No, it is not true, and it is not prompted by pity. It is the excuse for the Two Minute Hate against Emmanuel Goldstein.
Leveling absurd and unbelievable accusations against all critics is not a defect of the Politically Correct system, but the central feature. Politically Correctness is not a philosophy, political or otherwise. It is a call for the death of rational political discourse by shouting down all opposition, by libeling, outlawing and eventually killing any who are feared to harbor scruples, or whose lives prove inconvenient to the party.
If this seems an incredible statement, the history of the Twentieth Century, and the hundred million innocent lives ended by the policies of the Left, fascist and communist both, not to mention the news as recent as yesterday’s telling of renewed riots by fascists calling themselves antifascists at college campuses to drive away Conservative speakers, will testify without any further embellishment to make the statement credible.
If you have never heard the desire for your bloody death voiced by any partisans of the brave, new world this modern generation expects to inherit once they have torn all tradition, law, decency, nobility apart, and trampled the crucifix, all I can suggest is that you have not come to the attention as yet. Your loyalty to their precepts will not save you: they turn on and eat their own, like Saturn.
Why is the hate so hateful?
That question is more mysterious, for its roots are in the dark depths of the corrupt human heart whose tangled roots only heaven knows.
But as far as human eye can pierce, we can say. The whole structure of untruth has nothingness at its core and heart. It serves no purpose and has no logic to it. However, it does serve in the short term as something like a psychological defense mechanism, and this is done, as said above, but putting some good but lesser thing in the place of a higher good, so that a higher priority is placed on a trifle, like courtesy, and a consummate and paramount good, like truth, is dethroned.
A man, or, for that matter, a nation or generation, allegedly carrying nothing for truth does not indeed want to hear lies, or to be tricked or defrauded. Flattery is what is being sought, because truth will not serve. Pride drives the craving.
What else? This generation is rich and powerful beyond the dreams of any Pharaoh of old, flooded with luxuries and ease not even millionaires and absolute monarchs of one hundred years ago possessed. This generation is also corrupt in a fashion that silences comparison: not even the pagans who had temple prostitution or who proffered young boys for Emperors to sodomize ever legally rendered the bonds of marriage to be of none effect, as our laws have. The Aztecs never killed on their blood soaked stepped pyramids, nor did the fiery brass idol of Moloch consume, as many children as are annually sacrificed in abortion mills to the secular gods of feminism, casual sex, hatred of human population, and love of selfish convenience.
Reintroducing truth would put all things back in due proportion and proper place. This would shatter the idols to which millions of men have devoted the majority of their lives with diligently hoodwinked and rigorously close-eyed and close-minded zealotry. Philosophers and professors whose whole life work is gibberish and rubbish would be exposed to their own searing conscience, if truth were admitted to be true. Criminals both those in jail and those in the halls of power, the judge’s bench and executive mansions, would stripped naked of the excuses that act as life preservers to them, that all laws are manmade and that to bend or break them is laudable work, for which no next life awaits them to make them answer for their deeds. Artists whose entire life’s work, and indeed their whole soul and self-esteem consist of nothing but belittling greater works they cannot match, writers whose whole output consists of marring characters they cannot create, would be blinded by a truth that showed them their true position in history: not the crown of the muse, but a louse in her hair.
For such people, pride is self and self is pride. Humility to them is humiliation not to be endured. The burden of pride is one of many from which truth would set them free: this is a freedom they fear and hate as Christian men hate hell.
Every man who ever envied his betters, and had no one but himself to blame, would be left without anyone to blame. The precious, endlessly precious scapegoats, more dear than life itself to such souls, of the patriarchy, of institutional racism, the capitalists, the Jews, or whatever sick conspiracy of illuminati their feverish brains have produced this season, would be torn from their feeble, groping fingers. The lamp of truth would shine on the looking glass, and show them their own faces.
Lust would be left without excuse, and would bow to the boundaries of chastity, and half the starlets in Hollywood find themselves without a profession.
Gluttony, the national sin America loves more than any other, would be bridled by temperance and thrift, and the cunning advertising agencies pimping useless dross would hang themselves out of spite.
Avarice, a sin we have made into a virtue, would be revealed in all its dangerous ugliness if truth were unleashed. Capitalists and socialists disagree on the fine point of whether an individual has the right to the goods and wealth produced of his own labor, or whether his goods should be given to a despot in the name of social justice, and wasted. But they agree that acquiring worldly goods is itself a good, and to ask whether immortal souls should take as their highest goal not their improvement of their soul, but the acquisition of wealth that perishes is a question outside of the bounds of economics and politics to address, and so in the dull witted dark age through which we currently trudge, the question is rarely asked, and very rarely answered with an honest answer.
Wrath, that warmest of wines, so intoxicating to all feelings of self-justification, would be drenched in the icy mountain stream of fairmindedness, courtesy, chivalry, and justice, and even deadly enemies would be given their say and their due. And what would newspaper editorials address then, with no false issues to inflame to ire?
The warm bed of sloth, which dismisses all religious longings and philosophical speculations as boring or pointless, would likewise be jarred awake by the angelic trumpets of enthusiasm. It would be like the revolution of Copernicus, if the entire generation of self-centered spiritual pygmies discovered the world did not revolve around them. Sloth is a strange name for a sin that is so energetic, so easily bored, and so restless. Sloth is an urgent and painful desire not to think about one’s duty to heaven and to one’s fellow man. It is the addiction to distraction.
And who knows what might happen if truth were restored to her proper throne and crown? The yammering clamor of sloth might cease, and the deafness of pride might have its ear opened. Selfishness might be seen for the loathsome venereal disease it really is, or the flab of gluttony recede, never again to droop across the beltlines of America. The chaste and the modern modern woman might discover how to love and how to be worthy of love, and the unfeminine unhappiness she embraces allegedly to gain equality would no longer bar her way. And the love of brother for brother might shame into silence the shameless voices calling for racism, accusing everyone and everything of racism, or the even more shameless calling for new forms of racism as a cure for racism.
Who knows what might happen if truth drew her shining sword? Forgiveness might break out like a benevolent plague.
Hard as it will be for my atheist and agnostic friends to hear, witches and New Age mystics, but you have no answer for this. Christ is the answer. He is the truth. Christ alone can humble the proud without humiliating them.
To my foes, I hurl defiance and speak these words:
You have already tried crucifying the truth once, long ago, atop the Place of the Skull. The tree of torture you erected is a now a sign and sacramental of enduring joy, and of endless life. The Cross is joy you cannot touch and life you cannot end.
You have no weapons that can harm the truth. The spear of the centurion who pierced the side of Christ becomes a sacred relic, and serves us, not you, and grants victory after victory. How does one fight the truth that overcomes death?
You have already tried to bury the truth in a tomb. But the stone has been rolled away from the cave. No footprints of the body they carried into the tomb are in the dust going toward the mouth, but a pair of prints bearing the marks of iron nails lead away. They go up the side of the Mount of Olives, but not down again.
Join us, love truth, and find joy. Follow those feet where they lead.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
