The Last Crusade 08: Nine First Principles
Let us say clearly, at the outset, who we are, for what we fight, and in whose name. Let us say what the enemy is, and why he says he fights, and then say why he truly fights.
Who are we?
We are those who accept the fundamental first principles of Western Civilization.
For what do we fight? There are nine points of belief that form the foundations of civilization which are currently being subverted and undermined. To restore and rectify these we take up the cross.
We believe, first, in the majesty of truth; the impartiality of reason; the objectivity of reality. We believe in the authority of virtue; the verity of beauty; the dignity of man; the equality of the law; and the duty of the patriots, as free men, to uphold that law. And we believe in revealed truths too sacred for any law to approach or touch.
Because human dignity belongs to Man by nature, not by grant of law, hence natural also are his sacred rights to life, liberty, and the possession of the fruits of his labor. Sacred also are his duties, oaths, and covenants. We believe it is the sacred duty to enact among men just and equal laws to protect those rights and enforce those duties.
A manmade law purporting to alienate man from his natural rights merely loses its own authority as law.
Hence it is the duty of patriots to love their homes and nations and defend those laws. However, there are things more sacred than law which the law may not overbear, including the sacred duty to love, adore, and serve the Creator whose hand makes all the blessings men know, and man.
In other words, put more simply, we hold that truth is true, reason is reasonable, reality is real, goodness is good, beauty is beautiful, and that man is man. Sacred therefore are the laws that uphold, the flag that protects, and the cross that endows man with life and liberty.
From these principles spring corollaries too numerous to list here, but some few should be mentioned at the outset to forestall confusion, sincere and specious alike.
Because the enemy has so confounded the meanings of ordinary words, it behooves us to be clear. The equality of man is the equality of the laws defending his natural rights from trespass and violence at the hands of others.
Equality does not pretend any sameness of any other human quality, aside from his moral nature. From his moral nature springs his right of man to the fruit of his own labor, and his duty to bear the consequences of his own actions.
When the laws are equal, neither can the poor man break into the rich man’s mansion to rob and steal, nor can the rich man take the poor man’s land and flatten his hovel. The hovel is not equal to the mansion in height or cost or desirability. The houses are equal in nothing, except that the law protects both impartially. The law is equal. When the laws are equal, the doggerel of the amateur is protected from plagiarism no less than the epic of the poet laureate. Doggerel is not equal to poetry. The law is equal.
When we speak of the dignity of man, we speak not of his personal feelings of self worth, or of the gravity and sobriety of his speech and manners.
The word dignity refers to his rank.
No man by nature is born the sovereign of another man, nor is any born the livestock or possession of another. In societies where a man is said to be born a prince or born a slave, those ranks are fixed by manmade law, not by nature. We hold that those laws lack authority, for they offend the natural dignity of man. In one case, the infant prince is upheld to a false superiority that the child has not earned. In the other case, the infant slave is punished with his loss of native liberty for a felony he never committed.
The word equality means the laws are equal, not that the men protected by the law are indistinguishable. It does not mean they are born with the same talents, potentials, good character, or good fortune. It merely means each grown man of sound mind is responsible for his actions. He is not subhuman whom no law protects, and he is not a superman whom no law binds.
Likewise, a partial or unequal court of law dishonors the gift of justice. Likewise, a scientists or scholar who adulterates his result to political convenience violates the virgin majesty of truth. Likewise, those who lust for the property of others, and seek to batten themselves on the fruits of others’ labor, violates the sacred property rights of his brother, demeans his soul with envy, and mocks the American way of life.
Likewise again, those who trample tradition merely for the sake of novelty cheat both their forefathers and their progeny: hence changes are not to be made for light or transient reasons, and never radical change, but always gradually, lawfully, organically. Society is not a machine to be engineered, nor are the minds of the young merely blank slates on which for the iron pen of the reformer to write.
Neither is society merely a social contract; nor is a nation a hotel where one stores transient goods. Your home and homeland are your beloved.
It is for these things we take the cross of the crusade.
All men of good will are welcome in this crusade. An atheist or agnostic who believes marriage to be sacred, property rights to be sacred, human life from conception to natural death to be sacred, even if his eyes are too heavy or brain too proud to see the source of these sacred things, has a welcome part to play in our war against the darkness.
We fight in the name of Christ, for only in his name is victory certain. Those who wish to close ranks with us who cannot say that name are welcome, for our enemies are your enemies, and they wish us both dead.
What is the enemy?
The enemy pretends to organize a political party, but it is a party that continually changes its name, and its concerns have little or nothing to do with politics properly so called.
This party will call themselves liberal, even though they hate liberty. They call themselves progressives, even though they oppose progress and undermine it. They call themselves socialist, even though they destroy society. The economic theory of these so called socialists is merely an insolent abolition of economics, and therefore all attempts to enact these feverish visions of false prophets end in the abolition of the social order. They call themselves communists, even though they do not live as the early Christians, and share all property in common.
And every generation, as soon as they are known, they change their name again, and pretend to have nothing to do with their exact same party of a generation ago.
Politics properly so called is the discipline that studies by what laws and customs in times of peace and war the social order can survive and be bettered, that the safety and happiness of man might flourish.
Socialism betrays an insolent indifference to all matters relating to the scarcity of resources, the origin of prices and wages, and the disutility of labor. Marx and his epigones inquire into none of these things. They are merely wished away. In the socialist utopia, all goods are produced and distributed, and all work done, without prices and wages. All labor is voluntary and all goods are free.
This is not, after all, an economic theory. It is nothing but the abolition of all economic theories, the pretense that men can somehow live while ignoring the realities economics studies.
Likewise, and for the same reason, this so-called political party betrays an insolent indifference to the nature and origins of the law, the spirit of the laws, the organic nature of society, and the limitations of human political institutions. They crave thought police.
Thought police punish unspoken thoughts, but allow riots and fornication to go unchecked. In Progressive political theory, the thought police are to have infinite police powers, but to be bound by no law. In other words, the Progressive crave anarchy and totalitarianism at the same time.
In other words, as with their economics, the enemy’s politics consists of a theory that abolishes the discipline of politics.
It is nothing but the abolition of all political theories, the pretense that men can somehow live while ignoring the realities political institutions address.
Thus the enemy are not fighting for equality, social justice, economic reform. They are not fighting for any economic policy. They are not fighting for any legal or political reform. For they are not a political party at all.
For what cause says our enemy he fights?
Blink not at any dust thrown in your eyes. They pretend to stand for liberty and equality, but by liberty they mean only the liberty of a lawless government to impose its will on you. By equality they mean the imposition of unequal laws to punish their foes and reward their friends.
They pretend to abolish racism by imposing racial quotas and standards on every conceivable aspect of life, even things clearly unrelated to any issue of race. They pretend to abolish the differences between the sexes by punishing men for being men and by forcing women to be men. The Augusta Golf Course is subjected to extensive obloquy; nothing is said about mass rapes, honor killings, female genital mutilation, or the humiliations of the headscarf.
They pretend to be motivated by compassion and sweet reason, and they form howling mobs and encourage violent tumults.
Their outrage is artificial, selective, and only directed against targets where change is not possible, not meaningful, or not desirable.
Forcing all men to pretend a man who cuts off his male member and wears a dress is a woman, and must be called “her” and “she” is an attempt to change what cannot be changed: no man can be made into a woman.
Forcing the sole Christian bakery in a town with two dozen bakers to bake a wedding cake for sodomites desecrating the sacred oaths of matrimony accomplishes nothing. It is a purely ceremonial act, like forcing a Christian to trample a crucifix, a rite meant to show how the Caesar is superior to God. But no one forces Muslims to bake such cakes.
In any case, homosexuality is not made moral, or decent, and sodomites are not by magic turned into creatures capable of marrying each other, no matter what legal fictions are proposed defying reality.
Forcing employers to pay wages above the market rate exacerbates rather than ameliorates unemployment. Demands to equalize the pay of men and women without equalizing their work performance, hours, and experience likewise is counterproductive to the point of insanity.
The same pattern is seen again and again. The Left waxes hysterical over manmade global warming as we enter a global cooling period; the Left waxes hysterical over fascism when the only fascist tactics, rhetoric, and goals comes from the Left; the Left waxes hysterical over feminism when our laws and customs elevate the Western woman above her status in any previous age, while granting her countless special privileges denied to men; the Left waxes hysterical over overpopulation when we are suffering a demographic decline, and, in places, a catastrophic one; the Left waxes hysterical over a violent backlash against Muslims and therefore does everything possible to hide Muslim terror acts, to deflect attention from them, to distract the public, to mislabel them as other types of crimes or lone wolf attacks, and to savage those who dare speak the truth.
And they did the same for the Soviets a generation ago. To this day, the name of McCarthy is used as a by-word for a witch-hunt, even after history has abundantly vindicated him.
There are two common properties to all these examples and countless more. The Left is hysterical for the sake of hysteria. They are dishonest for the sake of dishonesty.
A problem that is not real cannot be solved. No one can free the Muslims in America from their internment in concentration camps when there are no such camps. No one can stop the ocean levels from rising if, in fact, they are not rising.
A make-believe problem is not meant to be solved. It is meant to be a problem. It is meant to cause hysteria.
You see, in an emergency, you are allowed to run a red light.
The hysteria is meant to forgive and to excuse the breakdown of normal due process, of normal due courtesy, of normal precautions and rights protecting precious things.
It is meant to excuse the pursuit of normal rational debate. During an emergency is no time for talk, no time for a vote, no time to be worried about some small infraction of your liberties. During an emergency, you can shout people down. You can shut people up.
What are they, really? For what do they fight, really?
He serves the enemy who believes these nine opposition principles, or who accepts the conclusions springing from such principles, whether he can articulate the axioms from which they spring or not.
The enemy says truth is subjective, that is, truth is not truth: therefore no lie is forbidden.
The enemy says human reason is partial, and untrustworthy: therefore rational argument is vain.
The enemy says reality is a matter of personal preference or social conditioning.
The enemy says that since reality is opinion, that therefore no standard exists by which any man or any culture can be judged superior or inferior to any other: therefore judgment in matters of vice and virtue is forbidden. Justice is unjust. A discriminating judgment is discrimination.
The enemy says beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and man the measure of all things: therefore ghastly ugliness that shocks the senses is true art, and all beauty must be dunked in urine, smeared with feces, sprayed with graffiti.
The enemy holds that man is merely a beast like any others or inferior.
The enemy holds that man enjoy collective rights only: which is to say, no rights at all.
The enemy holds that patriotism is warlike, therefore bigotry, therefore forbidden. Only hatred and contempt for one’s homeland is praiseworthy: therefore treason is the highest form of patriotism.
The enemy holds that God is dead: therefore anything is permitted.
Therefore right and wrong is merely matters of the strong oppressing the weak. Whatever Caesar permits is good; what he forbids is bad. There is no law higher than Caesar.
Because the enemy banished the very concept of objective morals, the enemy banished the concept of the conscience. If there is no objective moral light for this inner eye to see, then the voice of conscience is merely the echo of the Pavlovian conditioning of society, or the jerks on the marionette strings of selfish genes to whose tune we puppets dance.
But no man can live without a sense of right and wrong, any more than a motorist can drive crowded highways safely without traffic laws. So the enemy substitutes political correctness for conscience. Instead saying what is right and wrong, the enemy merely says some things are welcome or unwelcome, tolerant or insensitive, appropriate or inappropriate.
This has nothing to do with courtesy or politeness. The enemy takes special joy in swinish putrefaction of speech and vomit-spews of four-letter words. The enemy interrupts, silences, suppresses, and gags all opposition. Courtesy? The enemy is the absolute foe of courtesy. He must rob you of dignity in order to dehumanize you in order to demonize you in order to make it seem appropriate to kill you. For who would not punch a Nazi? Who would not kill a demon?
No, not courtesy. Assigning what is moral or immoral refers to an eternal standard, and saying what is polite and impolite refers to a cultural standard. The enemy will have none of either. But saying what is appropriate or inappropriate is saying what the authority allows. It is what the man with the whip permits. It is based on power, not on any standard. If the Powers That Be claim something is now suddenly inappropriate for you, while remaining appropriate for your enemy, the concept of “inappropriate” allows for no rebuttal or objection.
Political Correctness is a thought prison. It is a deliberate attempt to jam and gears of reason and reduce all public discourse to the meaningless jabber of Newspeak.
What is the point and the goal of Political Correctness?
It is an attempt to blank out the truth by abolishing all reference to objective truth.
This will abolish all logic from thought and discourse, and give irrational emotion free sway. This will abolish any reference to reality as the umpire of any discourse. This will demolish virtue and encourage vice, for the abortion of objective reality means the abolition of objective standards.
Beauty must likewise be abolished, lest a man’s sudden ecstasy at the sight of sublime things remind him of the beauty of truth and virtue unawares. Soul crushing ugliness crushes the soul. Without truth and virtue or any hope of truth and virtue, it is easy to rob men of their inborn dignity.
Dignity lost, is it simple enough to destroy the moral basis of law, which destroys the customs and virtues on which a free society rests, which destroys the nation, and, eventually, all civilization.
Many believe the goal of the Left in bringing down civilization is to increase their own power. I doubt it. Once the towers fall, and all the lights go out, there is nothing left to rule. The power they seek is the power to sin with impunity; to do wrong, and have all men praise them as doing good; to offend God, and laugh and tell themselves they will escape all retribution.
Civilization, law, liberty, dignity, beauty, reality, morality, reason and truth all stand in the way of this all-encompassing self-deception. Therefore the enemy seeks to destroy all these things.
Our spirit is the spirit of Christ, and of love. Theirs is Antichrist, and hate.
We believe in truth, reason, sanity, virtue, beauty, dignity, equality, liberty, and faith.
The enemies promotes belief in nihilism, nonsense, subjectivism, perversion, ugliness, degradation, collectivism, totalitarianism, atheism.
Now, obviously no one brain could hold all these contradictions and stay sane. Some men seduced by the Left believe a bit of one or a bit of another. But the general mob of Leftists circle between these nine points, some knowingly, and most unknowingly. The more of these nine anti-principles a man believes, the more politically correct, that is, the more empty of humanity, he is.
The Left is divided into Eloi and Morlocks. The Morlocks operate and maintain the intellectual machinery to provide the superstructure of excuses and justifications to deflect or shout down any rational inquiry into their nine fundamental axioms. They are more or less aware of the meaning of the axioms.
The Eloi are their food animals, merely led to follow the warm and thoughtless group-thoughts of the rabbit warren. They recite the opinions fed to them by the Morlocks and imbibe the soporifics and soma needed to keep the Eloi both docile enough to obey, and angry, paranoid, and hysterical enough to panic and riot upon command.
Ironically, one of these opinions Eloi are expected to believe without reflection and parrot without thought is the opinion that each is a individualistic non-conformist and a boldly independent thinker. One of their dogmas is that none of their dogmas are dogmatically held, but are merely the common sense and common decency of all compassionate people.
But when I speak of the enemy, I do not speak of any of the Eloi blinkered, hookwinked, bridled and saddled by the Morlocks. They are hapless and hysterical victims of a massive deception and self-deception, guilty of a neglect of thought, an overabundance of guilt, and a lack of mental courage. But the evil does not issue from them.
The Morlocks are not the enemy although they serve the enemy with eyes open, and ignorance is no excuse for their sins. But they are victims just as much as their own victims are.
These ideas, these nine nonsense axioms of truthlessness, illogic, unreality and so on, are harmful not only to the peace and happiness of any society that tolerates them, they are harmful to the sick and twisted souls who embrace them.
These ideas are not really ideas, none of them. They are anti-ideas, blank spots in the brain where thought goes blind and words turn into blithering noise. They are unthought.
And they have one and only one purpose. Unthought covers any thoughts of guilt. Unthought justifies wrath and envy and foolish pride. Unthought justifies violence. It justifies everything.
And unthought is addictive like cocaine.
Once you have benumbed any unhappy thoughts about the real world, and your own small yet wicked role in it, you are free to hallucinate yourself to have the godlike powers of defining true and false for yourself, right and wrong. You are free to delude yourself into thinking you are a tiny but omnipotent deity ruling a fine and private cosmos which extends no farther than the diameter of your own skull.
But anything that threatens to deprive you of the glorious freedom from truth, and benumb the frightening stabs of conscience, is now a threat not merely to a bit of momentary vainglory. It becomes a deadly threat to your very self-image and self-esteem. The addict will do and say anything, including repudiating all parts of himself that are human and humane, normal and decent and sane, to maintain his self-image.
Truth becomes his enemy, and, bit by bit, all truth, artistic, moral, mental, spiritual, he sponges of his own free will out of his heart and soul. Then he is fit food for the enemy.
These wretched fools are not the enemy. They are the tools and weapons of the enemy. The enemy is not physical and cannot be reached by physical weapons. The enemy is in their thoughts, in their hearts and in their souls.
And in yours and mine. The one place the enemy is not, is in the Book of Life.
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.
