CS Lewis’ example of the fine wine described at the end of Screwtape Proposes a Toast has a special logic to it. It is a mixture of the souls of those who were fanatical Calvinists with those who think only in terms of pilgrimages, sterility and hunger as real religion. That raw hatred was delicious to the palate of Hell.
And it is unending. Each group will be suffering eternally, but each group will also be blaming the other for their torment forever. Any lost soul who tried to be logical — they’re BOTH THERE — would be subject to the same solution used in both Hell and Canada. They would be punished.
I have noted people leaving BUGS because they found a Word. Our original editor went back to Iraq and became an Intelligence bureaucrat and his views changed right into Good Soldier views. At the end he nearly went ballistic at my objection to his Beloved Comrade Sergeant marrying a white woman.
I note we have not heard from Pain since he went off to theology school and told me that only “amateurs” think that Zoroastrianism had any effect on Christianity. That’s the last communication I remember from him.
CS Lewis said in his forward to the Screwtape Letters that the existence or nonexistence of actual demons has nothing to do with his faith. He was exposing the Mind of Hell.
What influence Zoroaster had or his very existence is not essential to my beliefs. And that is not what drove Pain off. Hell, I don’t even know for sure if he has been driven off. I’ve often been wrong and I expect to be wrong a lot more. But that is my point here.
I have been deserted or stabbed in the back many, many, many times by people who believed they had become Enlightened. These are exactly the people one recognized as being neither back-stabbers nor cynics. They are as honest as Torquemada or Cotton Mather ever were.
They simply have no room in their world for simple honesty or simple mercy or simple truth.
Everything warped about this kind of people is a warping of their natural feelings they were born with. They ban sex because it is abused. Jesus himself condemned prostitution and adultery. If he had been a later Christian, he would not have seen that much a distinction between prostitution and adultery and sex itself.
But Jesus was not a Zoroastrian. I think that, in a world where the two great monotheistic faiths were Zoroastrianism and Judaism, you could not see yourself as a scholar if you did not include Z in your discussions. That is a lot like people who claim to be Intellectuals today. They have to have a lot of Marxism in their discussions.
If you feel strongly about things, the temptation to become a Wordist eventually is almost irresistible. It is not natural for a human being to resist suggestion, as commenters have pointed out here and the Great Kresky said.
It is hard to be dedicated to the idea of human freedom without eventually becoming some kind of absurd Libertarian. We Are talking about something people die for, so it very quickly becomes capitalized. A person can believe in freedom, but can he go out and die for anything less than Freedom?
Can Salvation be “free and without price?” Not if Wordist Theologians have anything to do with it.
In order to save our race it is almost irresistible not to take on the trappings of swastikas and heel-clicking. Soon the swastikas and the heel-clicking and calling Hitler Adolf instead of Adolph become the focus of one’s attention.
It is very, VERY hard to explain to people that, though I have dedicated my life to a cause, that cause does not lead into a dead end of implications. To me, the moment a person begins to capitalize he ceases to be human.
My idea of freedom is the right to do as you wish. My idea of truth is whatever turns out to be fact. My idea of mercy is making people feel better than worse. Only in the white man’s world can these “simplistic” ideas make any sense at all.
In the Orient it all ends up in the dead end of Deep Philosophy. In Africa it ends up as spooks. In the white world, we are always turning into an alleyway of Wordism and slamming up against a brick wall.
But science has made it in the white man’s world because, despite all these dead ends, we still eventually end up heading generally in the way of truth, of reality, of what works. The only white societies that have gone down for good are the ones which were once white and are now brown.
That is the fact. That is the truth.
#1 by Dave on 06/20/2010 - 2:08 pm
Why do white intellectuals go off the rails so readily? Answer: It is so easy to forget that the world must be observed before any attempt is made to explain it.
It is so easy to become vested in a particular explanation or theory. You put effort into it, you become vested in it.
I see this all the time with intellectuals. Subtly, their particular perspective becomes something “graven” in their hands, in the sense “etched in stone”. Subtly, they become closed to new information and their particular perspective takes on the character of an investment in magical ritual.
Reality is free to be anything it wants to be. Any competent soldier knows that. In combat, you had better be observing the real world, in distinction to directing your attention to pet theories. In combat, such misdirection of attention gets you killed. But in academia and government, such misdirection of attention routinely passes peer review.
That is why ideologies, entirely delusional, dominate politics.
But there is much more to it.
What is the deeper reasons white people slip into Wordism?
By way of example, I suspect certain of my friends, those who have bought into to some cult, is that they do it in an attempt to relieve being emotionally upset.
Cultism is driven also by bad actors. These are people who are nasty because they are nasty. We are surrounded by born criminals, that is, genetic criminals. We are also surrounded by the evil lie that denies this genetic plague on society.
I can pick up the criminal mind in a heartbeat. It shows itself easily. Why so many people are fooled is beyond me. But genetic criminals are everywhere and most of them are male. Many of them are stupendously successful. That is much more frequent than people suppose. We are conditioned to think of criminals as losers. The destined for jail crowd, (or already in jail crowd) is only one subset of the criminal world.
But why all the emotional upset? Why is it so common for so many of us to be perpetually upset?
Why all this running into Wordism in order to relieve it?
The answer is that we are being bullied. Our government at all levels is bullying us, ruthlessly. The local business community bullies us. Agribusiness bullies us. The media and entertainment industry bullies us. Microsoft and Google bullies us. The telecommunications industry bullies us. Our educational institutions bully us. The medical community bullies us. The sports and athletic industry bullies us. Then we have all these religious and missionary nut jobs running around with their particular form of bullying. We are being ruthlessly bullied from all sides.
No matter what we do, we are being presented by some attempt to play us. We have to deal with endless and incessant attempts to con us. Not just one attempt, multiple attempts. Daily. The bullying we suffer is endless, and incessant. It is ruthless.
The political cycles are just the cadences and waxing and waning of officially sanctioned ruthless bullying.
The public schools are nothing but institutional organisms for kicking kids’ asses around. The kids assess get kicked from first grade on. By the time a kid has a bachelor’s degree, he or she is often a nutcase. It is entirely understandable to me. The psychos go on to get advanced degrees. Loaded with debt, these kids who have supposedly become adults are ruined for life.
Nobody can take all this bullying. Nobody can take all this oppression.
How did a society ever become as ruthless as this viscous abomination of America? This America we are told that is free.
America in fact is a hellhole. It is a hellhole of vicious tyranny, as vicious and cruel as any in history.
It is hard to keep your head straight when you live in a hellhole. It is hard to keep your head straight when you are under vicious dictatorship.
That is the simple truth.
#2 by shari on 06/20/2010 - 3:02 pm
Yes, it’s definately easy to be tied in knots and feeling sad. Try to remember how it felt when you were a child, and were interested in everything. Or take notice of a child who IS interested in everything, before anything gets to them.