"The Unreality Principle"

A Christian Argument Against the Modern Left

Sunday, December 06, 2015

The Unreality Principle

John C. Wright explains why the Left cannot, and will not, wake up. Not now, not ever.

How long until the Left wake up? The answer is: NEVER.

The Left will never wake up to reality for precisely the reason that Leftism is a mental system of excuses and psychological tricks and traps meant to allow the Leftist to escape from reality.

That is what all their rigmarole, jabberwocky, lies and evasions, all their complex obfuscations, and penning endless tomes of endless nonsense from Marx to Keynes to Al Gore, all their riots, marches, protests, sit-ins, think-tanks, media moguls, money laundering, awards shows, convulsions, antics, stunts, clamor, libel, slander, and cacophony is for: Reality avoidance.

That is all that it is for.

It was not always thus. Perhaps a generation ago, there were Leftists who joined the Democrat Party for what were political reasons, to promote labor unions, impose regulation on banks and businesses in response to some threat, real or imaginary, posed by the free market, or to encourage the welfare state to help the poor.

Perhaps two generations ago, there were real Marxists who really believed that socialism was more efficient and more productive of human wealth than the free market. But after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, no honest person can maintain that socialism is more efficient at encouraging wealth and creating and distributing goods and services than a free market.

All socialism produces are mounds of corpses in mass graves, and gulag-states surrounded by barbed wire, with all guns pointed inward.

Even Bill Clinton, a weasel without an honest bone in his body, announced the era of big government to be over, and took the first step to dismantling the American version of Marxism, Johnson’s Great Society. If he saw socialism as a failure, anyone can see it.

And so the criticism changed strategy. In the shadow of the Holocaust of Jews by the Nazis, where Nazism became the synonym for evil in a world which has ceased to speak of the Devil, racism was identified as the main scourge and flaw of the West, and attempts to eradicate racism by means of embracing multiculturalism became the norm.

This is ironic. Tribalism, racism, and the presumed superiority of one’s own bloodline over any foreigners is the norm of human existence, and only the Christian religion gives anyone any reason to condemn it. Here in the West and here alone is anyone even concerned at calling it evil or trying to eliminate it. It would be like the West trying to wipe out polygamy, when we are the only ones whose culture rejects polygamy. No one else sees it as wrong.

Be that as it may. Multiculturalism is not a doctrine, it is an attitude: the attitude is to praise inferior and savage societies in any ways in which they differ from Christendom, and to blame, scold, vilify and upbraid Christendom for any ways in which we differ from Utopia. It is the attitude of a nagging wife unwilling to divorce a hard-working husband and provider she hates and loathes.  Multiculturalism is nagging.

The nagging is based on the idea that all cultures are equal, and all equally provide for human liberty and human happiness. Skyscraper and yurt: the same. Cathedral and igloo: the same. Wright Brothers and the Cargo Cult of Melanesia: the same. American cosmetics industry and pre-Western Chinese practice of breaking the bones in baby girls’ feet for footbinding: the same. Western abolition of slavery and Hindu caste system: the same. Medical Doctors and Witch-Doctors: the same. Scientific agriculture and Maori cannibalism: the same. Progress and stagnation: the same. Christian martyr and Muslim suicide bomber: the same. Jesus and Mohammed: the same.

See how it works?

The Christian West, with our industrial and scientific revolutions (the byproduct of our Christian metaphysics, university system and Christian individualism) not to mention our legal and juridical advances are held by hypothesis not to have made any particular advances in human liberty and happiness.

Any use of discriminatory judgment between the cultures of, say, the British Empire and he Aztec Empire is the product of bigotry, bias, or race-hatred.

After 9/11, it became clear that not all cultures equally provide for human liberty and happiness. Indeed, it is clear enough to any honest observer that come cultures are productive of vast misery and vast oppression, especially oppression of women, of children, of the weak and helpless. The growing slave trade in underage boys used as catamites by the Muslim is a clear enough sign of this, as well as the rape statistics that follow Muslim migrants entering Europe.

In recent years, with the cult of multiculturalism dead, and Marxism rightfully tossed into the crematorium of dead yet stupid ideas, the only thing left for the Left to do was to break all ties with honesty.

Political Correctness has its roots in Stalinism, and is as old as Marx himself, as old as the first lie every told by a snake in Eden. But since 9/11, with both their idols of multiculturalism and socialism smashed, the press and the Left generally expelled their less extreme elements from their midst, or shamed them into silence, and embraced falsehood as the source and summit of all good.

This is what I call ‘the Unreality Principle’ which is the principle that a lie is better than the truth because to lie and to believe a lie proves one’s loyalty. To lie and believe lies is morally superior than to tell and believe the truth, and the more outrageous the lie, the greater the moral superiority one can award oneself.

This is why you have to turn your back on them. This is why you have to reject them and refuse to have anything to do with them. They literally live in a different reality than you do; it is no less influential on their attitude and behavior than the real world despite being entirely imaginary.

There is one thing, and only one thing, capable of reliably cutting through the Unreality Principle and that is Jesus Christ. Logic can't. Science can't. Rhetoric can't. Bonhomie and good will to Men can't.

Jesus himself told his disciples to turn their backs and brush the dirt from their feet in response to those who would not listen. Do the same.

 

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-unreality-principle.html

Afterword by the Blog Author

I'm including this essay in Daily Quiddity although I think it presents a narrow and potentially fallacious argument.  I think the modern political left does indeed follow an "unreality principle" as described above, but I deeply doubt that only a certain sort of Christianity can detect and criticize it properly.

Scientific realism and Lockean empiricism could make this argument without being so abrasive.  The "middle way" (between Catholicism and Protestantism of Anglicans, a view that places reason as a central spiritual value) would likely endorse the features that criticize the "unreality principle."  Greek cynics would assuredly agree with the argument against the unreality principle.  The Druids never wrote down there core beliefs but would almost certainly oppose the unreality principle. An anti-utopian atheist like Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine would oppose the unreality principle.

I have included the above essay about the unreality principle because I think it insightful and valuable, even though it includes some critical premises that I don't endorse personally.