Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Dag's a Sowell man, part ?

The loss of will is eventually the loss of power and of life. Is America Today the France of Yesterday?, of 1936, asks Thomas Sowell. It may be, but in saying so we don't wish to give the impression that the will to power satisfactorily explains human nature or politics. Will is either psychopathic, or it is in conversation with the divine, and since humanity has so far survived itself, the latter must predominate, at least to date. Sooner or later psychopaths die away or they disturb people enough that ordinary people dredge up the will to do something about them, though often only after countless unnecessary deaths. The divine will, as humanity comes to understand it - which is not the will to power, but rather to renounce power that is not conducive to real human needs - is necessary to become human and to live in a community that can find the will to control the psychopathic. The divine will, that which we come to see is required of us, is, according to Gil Bailie and Phillip Rief, something that begins with a healthy respect for spiritual discipline:
Here we now see, with startling clarity, how little our established political distinctions between left and right, conservative and radical, revolutionary and reactionary, matter nowadays. Rather, any remaking of political distinctions will have to ask, first, whether there is in fact a discipline of inwardness, a mobilization for fresh renunciations of instinct; or whether there is only the discipline of outwardness, a mobilizing for fresh satisfactions of instinct. Such a distinction will divide contemporary men and movements more accurately; then we shall find fashionable liberals and fascists on the same side, where they really belong.

2 comments:

Dag said...

When I began writing my magnum opus, No Dhimmitude, in 2004 my thesis was that the Left and the primitives of Islam and the Right fascists of Europe are all akin and conflated into post-modernist nihilism. At 1,500 pages it's a devil of a task to edit. To sum it up in a few lines is impossible, and yet to more and more people, better organized than I, clearer communicators than I, the truth of the conflation is obvious and becoming moreso to more people more and more frequently.

I have to ask, as others ask of me, what I offer instead of mere hatred of fascism, fascism Left, Islamic, Green, or White. Am I more than just a bitter and angry blogger? Do I have something to offer that at least appears better than what's on offer now? I argue that I do, and that it is, in a word, aporia.

Yes, there was a post once, as I recall, in which I was slightly more than rhetorically gifted. Well, OK, I don't do that as often anymore. I try to keep my prose on this side of restraint. That doesn't mean either that I wouldn't be unrestrained in other circumstances or that I'm angry. I don't have 'Peer's understated style, which, for those who missed the point of his post is a call to war, (if not more); nor do I share with Charles a shining and obvious Human decency; however, in spite of our differences in style and content, each of us is wholly dedicated to the preservation of Human freedom.

With freedom comes responsibility, and that is sometimes the need to do the harder thing rather than the lesser, to do the thing that seems harder that is perhaps easier if one would accept ones responsibility. Refer to Hegel for a better exposition of my point here.

In short, over-all my point is that we have a responsibility to act for freedom, even on behalf of those who do not at this time desire it and who actively do not want it. I write that we must employ school teachers with guns across the Earth to save the children of the fascists who will in their turn be enslaved and who will then enslave as their time comes in perpetuity. Who am I to judge? I am a free man who accepts that there is responsibility in freedom.

But I don't know what's good for others. I know that the freedom to choose ones own life is better, and that without that freedom, one cannot allow another the freedom either. Since I don't know everything or even very much I leave it open, that being the very aporia of the Good, the never-ending pursuit of more better. There is no "What if..." in slavery. I accept it a priori that freedom of the mind is good and that slavery is a priori bad. There are those who do not and perhaps cannot see such. They are not to be reasoned with because the a priori itself is alien to them, and they are often our own Left dhimmi fascists.

Will? I debated the use of the word in my previous title, knowing its fascist connotations. I understand too its psychopathic connotations, which is why I am not surprised to see 'Peers use it in his post above. Nor will it surprise any long-time readers of No Dhimmitude that one of my regular correspondents wrote of a day to ask, naively I think, if I am a psychopath.

To judge by my photograph on display, the one in which I bear an uncanny resemblance to Jean-Paul Marat, a Leninist revolutionary of the 1790s, one might think so. Bitter, angry, and violent to a degree that would frighten most people if only they knew what such violence is. I do know. I've seen it first-hand. I know, and I know you do not want to know. So I do what I can, in a frantic state at times, to preserve us all from the terror of what will come if we do nothing at all from a lack of Will.

To make sense of what I write, you have to trust me. To do that you have to trust that you an step away from everything you think you know, and you must accept that you know as little as I, and that what little we do know might be wrong. And then you have to act as a free person with a mind that works in conjunction with the instincts and intuitions you might have dulled to the point of uselessness. Say: "I don't know, but I think this action is better than death and slavery. And in not knowing I accept that I will act because to act to defend freedom is better than to do nothing and allow the death and destruction that Dag says will come."

We must at times do the harder thing. There are some, even many, I'm sorry to say, who think of me as a fascist and a psychopath. I'm not angry, I'm not bitter. I am frantic that too many cannot and will not see the coming tragedy that I can explain and that others will show you the scars of if only you'd deign to look and think. Been there, done that. Remove the iPod, listen. This is a serious problem and it's not just us who will suffer but those poor bastard too stupid and too intoxicated by the fascists using them to see that they are the fodder for the Death Machine that is the Left, that is the heir to all fascism today.

Angry? Bitter? I'm totally freaking out here.

truepeers said...

Not to be too understated, but yes. Let anger turn to resolution and to love for aporia, the same love that will be our attitude towards the losers as soon as we have have soundly defeated them and shown that freedom must rule, that even losers must make the choice to be slaves.

Free people always appreciate the many ways to skin a cat or to unfold a shared historical revelation. That you hear echoes in others' writing is a great thing: our side is intellectually cogent, our enemies are not. They have mindless ritual to echo; we have the fruits of a shared intellectual freedom.