Archive for February 25th, 2011

Idols and Institutions

The story goes that a man went up onto a mountain and consulted with the Source of Truth. His people saw him as their leader and his going onto the mountain began with their celebration of his doing so.

But when he came back from the Mountain, his people were doing what everybody did. Instead of welcoming him back and listening raptly to what he had learned, as they had so unanimously sworn to do a week before, they had gone back to what everybody did, they had built themselves an idol and were worshipping it.

In 1969, after an unprecedented program, a man stood on the Moon. All the world watched breathlessly.

This was an epochal triumph, and everyone felt it.

When the astronauts arrived back on earth, we were back to arguing whether Truth was in Sara Palin’s Protestant distortion of the institutions built on her Protestant construction, National Review’s Catholic Golden Calf, different versions of Karl Marx’s proposed Universal Institution, the Libertarian Final Solution to All Problems, and so forth in their thousands and millions.

As one astronaut put it, “I expected to see the first man on the Moon in my lifetime, but I never imagined I would see the LAST.“

Moses must have felt the same way coming from the Mountain as this man felt after returning from the Moon.

Like Moses’ followers, we drifted right back to building and worshipping idols in a few days after he was out of sight.

Today the symbol of Science is a windmill. Around the windmill is an institution, a worldwide bureaucracy dedicated to stagnation and the ersatz morality they throw together each week.

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