Lucifer the Freedom Fighter

At a writers’ meeting I attended recently, the challenge was to write some familiar story from the point of view of the villain. One did Wile Coyote. One did Voldemort. Someone did Pontius Pilate. Someone tried to write about the fallen angels from the Devil’s point of view. Nothing especially shocking about that; Milton did the same. I do not recall the details.

But then someone piped up, “That’s not the way it really happened.”

“What actually happened was that Lucifer was God’s first son. Before Jesus. He was God’s favorite. But he objected to angels not having free will. So God threw him out of heaven.”

Someone else across the table raised an objection: “No, that’s not right.”

And she responded firmly. “You can’t dispute that. It’s the real history.”

The meeting just moved on.

I too was in no mood to challenge something so mad. Especially since she was so adamant. But I was left wondering where this came from, and how she could possibly feel such certainty. 

Of course Lucifer’s fall from heaven is not “history.” No historical account is beyond dispute, saying something is history does not end an argument, but even so, history is based on written records from the relevant time. No one was present at the war in heaven, taking notes. It is supposed to have happened at the beginning of creation, before the first man.

Nor does this woman’s account of Lucifer’s motive make any sense. If angels lacked free will, how could Lucifer himself rebel against God?

The Bible says Lucifer rebelled seeking to “make himself like the Most High.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, para 392-3:

“This ‘fall’ consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter's words to our first parents: ‘You will be like God.’ …

It is the irrevocable character of their choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels' sin unforgivable. ‘There is no repentance for the angels after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after death.’”

Lucifer and the fallen angels rejected God’s authority while in his presence. Just as the damned each individually and consciously choose hell at death, in the divine presence. This makes it unambiguous and irreversible. And for the reason Milton gives: “I would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.”

So, this strange idea does not come from history, as claimed. It is not from the Bible. It is not from Church tradition, and it is not a logical thought. Perhaps this woman was getting her “facts” from some gnostic tradition? But I can’t find anything like it in the gnostic texts. There do seem to be references to Satan as God's elder son in some Mormon scripture; but not the part about free will.

How can someone be so certain of something so strange and counter to traditional understanding, something she might have read somewhere once, that she would assert it adamantly to a room of perhaps twenty people?

Was I dealing with a madwoman? Yet some at the table knew her well, and nobody thought her insane. 

It seems to me a symptom of the present age. We have generally become untethered from any sense of truth or reality, so that anyone is free to believe anything, and impose it on those around them by strength of will. 

Thus men can decide to be women, or women men. People can continue to believe debunked claims like the mass graves hoax, or the January 6 insurrection hoax, or the Charlotte “fine people” hoax, or the Russia hoax. When you do not believe in God, you can believe in anything, and people believe what they want to believe. Or become paranoid.

This idea of Lucifer as the righteous rebel does sound like something someone might want to believe, if they wanted to deny sin, deny the authority of God, and claim the right to do what they will. 

Using Blogger's new AI tool to insert relevant links above. It appeared just today, and trying it out.

Influencers

 

Ramakrishna

I challenged a Chinese student to reflect on the influences on his thinking: whom did he trust? Whom did he accept as an authority?

It is a useful exercise in these times, when authorities seem untrustworthy. It is time to reestablish our bedrock.

So I propose to outline my own influences.

I cannot trust the government. I cannot trust the priests, bishops, cardinals, or even the pope. I cannot trust the legal system. I cannot trust the academy. I cannot trust “the science.” I cannot trust the professions. I cannot trust my doctor. I cannot trust artists.

But there are still the older authorities, who, although dead, can speak to us. There are the great minds of the past.

First is Plato’s concept of the ideal forms. I believe it is absolutely true, vitally important, and generally suppressed. As Blake said, the mind must enter this world as a garden fully planted. I do not trust Plato on politics. Politics and metaphysics take a different kind of thinking; a philosopher who is good on one seems inevitably bad on the other. 

On politics, I trust John Locke. I’d add John Stuart Mill on freedom of speech, and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Everything good in government can be extrapolated from these.

But I think Locke’s ontology and epistemology is absurd.

George Orwell is also an influence in politics. Milton Friedman is an influence in economics.

Probably my main influence among philosophers is Descartes. I think his conclusions in the Meditations are the foundation of all possible knowledge, and definitive on the nature of the human soul. I then accept Berkeley’s resolution of Descartes’ “mind-body” conundrum: that is, how these categorically different spheres of being, mind and body, can interact. Simple: there is no body. I do not believe anyone can refute this. Blake: “the body is that portion of the soul perceptible to the five senses.”

William Blake has also been a profound influence on me. He was really my door into philosophy, and into monotheism. He is usually thought of as a poet, or if not that, an engraver. But he was a universal genius.

I believe Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God is irrefutable. But it is only one of many; I also find Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument irrefutable.

The Greek myths, Aesop’s fables, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and the fairy tales are authoritative on human psychology. Accept no substitutes.

Then there is the Bible. Even if you do not consider it the revealed word of God, you must accept it as all the vital information our ancestors gathered over the millennia, which they wanted to convey to us. If you are going against the Bible, you know you are wrong.

Confucius’s Analects are also authoritative. They have kept China in good order for millennia. Alarms bells should go off if you are clearly going against anything there.

I cannot point to any one other specific source in Eastern thought. I have learned much from Buddhism, and from Hinduism, but in the end it all pointed back to ethical monotheism. As Ramakrishna put it, “I want to taste sugar; I don’t want to BE sugar.”

What Is Real?

 

"Everything you can imagine is real”—Picasso

This quote appears on the cover of the latest issue of Verse Afire, a Canadian poetry journal.

The observation is self-evidently true. 

If you imagine a unicorn, for example, said unicorn is necessarily real, or you could not imagine it. The only question is whether it exists as a physical entity, or a spiritual entity: sensed, or imagined.

This is also the fastest and simplest proof of God: if he did not exist, you could not formulate the statement “Does God exist?” The question automatically answers itself.

You may object that by “exist,” you mean, does the thing exist independent of me thinking about it? Is its existence purely subjective?

Yes, God exists apart from your thinking about him, and unicorns exist apart from your thinking about them. Otherwise, when you say “God” or “unicorn,” your listeners would not know what you mean. Yet they immediately do. Moreover, you can stop thinking about unicorns, or God, and then, the next time you think of them, there they are again. It is just the same as with that chestnut tree down the street: you know that it exists objectively because others also see it, and because you can turn and look away, then look back, and it is still there. So too with unicorns.

In sum, the idea that things you imagine are not real is a primitive materialist superstition

There Is No Subconscious

 

Thanks to Freud, the concept of a “subconscious mind” has seeped into our culture. People even hail it as an important scientific discovery, similar to the law of gravity or theory of evolution. But the concept is self-contradictory.

It posits a part of self that is independent of self (“ego”). It posits a part of consciousness of which we are  not conscious. 

These characteristics are definitive of “other.” 

There is no subconscious mind.

The concept is constructed from our experience of memory. Memories emerge into consciousness from some unknown place, where they abide when we are not thinking of them. 

But before Freud muddied the waters, we had Plato’s concept of the ideal forms, the Buddhist concept of a “storehouse consciousness,” Coleridge’s “primary imagination.” Put simply, an objectively existing spiritual world. And this is the only coherent explanation.

The fact that memories continue to exist whether or not we or anyone are thinking of them, identifies them as not subjective, part of ourselves, but independent objects of consciousness. This is simply true by definition. Just as the fact that the corner lamppost seems to exist whether or not we are looking at it, demonstrates that it is not a part of us and our consciousness, but an independent object. 

If the memories we encounter seem by and large to be entirely personal, that does not make them a part of ourselves. Our sense experiences are also personal: we see only what is around us in space. They may be only a small part of a wider world, just as Africa exists, or Alpha Centauri, although we have never seen it.

But Freud actually finds that memories are not personal; in the house of memory, there seems to be wills operating independent of our own. The subconscious makes us think, say, even do things contrary to our will.

We always knew this too: these wills are the independent spiritual entities identified worldwide as angels, demons, fairies, gods. We know they exist on exactly the same evidence that we know other human or animal spirits exist, that the things we see are not all simply objects: because they are clearly not subject to our will, but follow their own wills.

Just to make the matter clearer, or more confusing if you hold to the Freudian formula, Jung has demonstrated that we are capable of remembering things we have never seen nor heard. Dragons, for example, unicorns, phoenixes, vampires, zombies, and so forth. These are not individual memories, and not individual “imaginings” either; for the same creatures and characters recognizably appear in myths, legends, and folk tales all around the world.

The Freudian “subconscious” is just an alibi, a spooky tale told at bedtime to frighten off further questioning, an attempt to explain away the spiritual aspect of existence, because it contradicts the materialistic dogmas of scientism. But the thesis itself violates all the basic tenets of science as well as philosophy. One of which is that one must go with the simplest explanation to account for the facts.

Which, in this case, is the existence of a spiritual dimension that exists independently of the material.

Trump's Lies

 

Here’s a riddle. The number one complaint about Trump on the left is that he lies. The Washington Post claims to catalogue 30,573 “lies or misleading claims” over his first term; a “tsunami of untruths.”

Examples:

“He overstated the ‘carnage’ he was inheriting, then later exaggerated his ‘massive’ crowd and claimed, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that it had not rained during his address. He repeated the rain claim the next day, along with the fabricated notion that he held the ‘all-time record’ for appearing on the cover of Time magazine.”

Yet, according to a recent poll, those who support Trump trust him to tell the truth more than they trust religious leaders, their friends, or even their own family.

These views directly contradict one another. How is this possible? Are we experiencing different truths?

Exactly.

The claim that Trump lies is intrinsically dubious. All politicians lie; Joe Biden will say anything. So will Justin Trudeau. So why this peculiar focus on Trump? Surely Trump is being held to a different standard here.

And note the lies the Post first cites to make their case: whether or not it was raining during his inauguration. Whether he holds the record for most Time cover stories. A claim that he exaggerated America’s problems. They seem oddly trivial. Would you call an acquaintance a liar for thinking it rained when it had not?

Here’s how the paradox is solved: the left, those who oppose Trump, are likely to embrace postmodernism and the dogma that there is no objective truth; only “my truth” and “your truth.” So that a man can declare himself a woman, and that becomes incontestably true.

When they say Trump “lies,” what they really mean is that he is not endorsing “their truth”: what they wish were true. He refuses to go along with their preferred “narrative,” which is to say, fiction.

Interestingly, Trump is apparently not entitled to a pass on the premise that he is asserting “his truth.” 

This is a backhanded admission that he is not asserting “his truth,” but truth itself. He refuses to lie, and that is what is intolerable.

Madness and Civilization

 

Since it came up in our reading, I posed to my students in the last few days the question, “is there a rule book of a program for life? Is there a purpose to life?”

Unfortunately, none could give a satisfactory answer.

My most thoughtful student first offered the constructivist position: the goal and the rules and the real are whatever one’s own society has decided they are.

So, okay, is it, on this basis, legitimate to criticise Nazi Germany—let alone go to war with them? Is it legitimate to go to war to end slavery in a society that accepts it as proper? What about child sacrifice? Cannibalism? Wife-beating? They can be no better or worse in principle than any other random moral standard, right?

And when the world believed the world was flat, then it was flat.

He backed away at this, and proposed instead the existentialist position. We are free to decide for ourselves on our own particular life goals.

We had been reading MacBeth. So, did MacBeth or Lady MacBeth choose properly, in making their life goal to gain power no matter who else got harmed? Don’t they themselves soon come to regret the choice? And indeed, on this basis, o we have any right to criticize John Wayne Gacy? Execute, perhaps; but arbitrarily, in the end.

These are the official, and it seems prevalent, views on ethics and ontology in our time. They are logically and indeed morally untenable. For right and wrong, justice, and reality are actually objective and immutable qualities. You cannot will a thing into being, or into being right.

This shows why mental illness is rapidly on the rise. It explains why drug use and suicide are surging. And it explains why mass shootings and such desperate escapes as transvestitism are on the rise. It explains  social breakdown generally.

The problem is quite simple, and it is drastic: to most moderns, life itself is pointless.

Some, the good among us, will sink into hopeless depression. Some will seek death, a chemical escape, or self-mutilation. Others will conclude that the only value left is self-interest, and become like MacBeth.

This is often a failure of parenting. But then, if the parent has no moral core or values, they have nothing to pass on. And our culture has suffered a collapse of values. 

Going to Catholic schools growing up, the answer to the question was obvious. The purpose of life was to know and love God, and to serve him in this world and the next. There was a rule book: the Ten Commandments. One might reject it, but at least the answer was held out to you. 

Public schools, of course, no longer teach any such thing. They teach constructivism, or existentialism.

There I no excuse for this; for even across all religious beliefs, the purpose of life is clear, and always has been, even to the ancient pagans. The purpose of life is—in fact, self-evidently—to seek and promote truth, justice, and beauty. This corresponds to the Catholic teaching, because that is what God is: the perfect ultimate source and essence of truth, justice, and beauty. But it is equally true ithout that insight. There is, leaving aside the Ten Commandments, necessarily, a necessary rule: the rule of universal love, expressed in all cultures as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Kant demonstrated that, apart from any specific religious belief, this was a categorical imperative: treat others as an end, never a means. Act as you would wish all others to act. Stray from these essential truths, and you are insane.

Most of us are, in the true sense, insane.

It makes me fear to even walk among other men.

Klavan on Truth

 

https://youtube.com/shorts/lWeYoYQqK6c?feature=share

It's a broken world. Anyone satisfied with it is depraved.

All Things Visible and Invisible

 

It has been brought to my attention recently that a large number of people, possibly a majority, actually believe that the physical world is the real world. Not just that the physical world is real—which is debatable—but that there is nothing beyond the physical world—which is stark insanity.

What brings me most immediately to this thought is some poems appearing in my email box from the League of Canadian Poets, under their “Poetry Pause” programme (you can sign up free here). One was just the poet describing her body:

Most loyal beautiful body

--Who aches only for your love.

 Another was the poet describing her desk.

A surplus teacher’s desk, 

solid oak, three heavy drawers

on each side of a skirted knee-hole.

There is no poem to such poems. Poetry speaks of the transcendent. We do not need it to talk about what is before our eyes.

Another example of materialism, in the textbook from which I taught this morning: it took pains to distinguish between “fact” and “opinion,” but never noticed or noted that there is a more important third category, truth that is not fact. Here’s an obvious example:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Not a trivial point.

In the wider world of truths, facts are trivial; yet only facts are acknowledged by the standard textbooks.

Another example: most people are quick to deride “materialism,” but then they think that materialism simply means wanting or having wealth. A purely materialistic concept of materialism, a cartoon. They are not out of the box. They just resent people who have more material than they do.

I read a poem at a recent meeting of a poetry society, which asserted, in rhyme, that the delusions of the mentally ill had truth in them beyond the ken of psychiatrists. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

And if he asks in riddle who you are

You must lie as dead as paper-thin straight line

Assume a name--say, one you took at birth

And pretend you only know of space and time.

Surely a group of poets would get it.

The first reaction from an audience member: it reminded them of Ogden Nash, or Alexander Pope.

What? Either meaningless nonsense, then, or mere clever wordplay. Pope is conspicuous for never speaking of the transcendent. For this Blake mocked him.

I can’t decide whether that respondent was trying to deny the existence of anything beyond the senses, or whether he was really so lobotomized in his view of existence.

Another listener chimed in that she liked the poem, and had often written herself about social justice.

Another common modern tack. Poets now all always either talk about “nature,” meaning the purely material world, or politics, the quest for power over others. Neither is worth an honest poem. 

It seems to me necessarily true that anyone who is not fully aware of the world beyond the visible is lacking a soul. More or less by definition. They are only robots.

Yet realizing that many are at this spiritual level explains the common conflation of just about everything with sex and power.

You Will Live Forever. Deal with It.

 

Friend Xerxes has made a declaration in his most recent column:

“Nor are we, as some like to believe, immortal souls temporarily housed in human bodies.”

He does not explain this claim.

To Christians, the Bible is a final authority. The Bible seems utterly definitive in saying this is exactly what we are. 

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

But the Bible also agrees with all other ancient authorities. The pagan Romans and Greeks also held this to be so—that the soul goes on to an afterlife. The Egyptians, Chinese, and Hindus held it to be so. The native people of North America held it to be so. The aborigines of Australia held it to be so.

An appeal to authority is not definitive. But if you are going against all authority, the onus is on you to make your case. As Chesterton observed, you cannot tear down a fence simply because you do not understand why it is there. Nobody has the right to tear down a fence until they do understand why it is there. If you were to proclaim that there was no such place as Africa, you would need to explain why all the atlases are wrong.

Xerxes perhaps hints at an argument in the parenthetical comment, “as some like to believe.” This suggests that people believe in an immortal soul and an afterlife because they find it comforting. This is a familiar claim from Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

But why is it not at least as comforting to suppose that at death, consciousness simply ends? What sounds bad about eternal rest? This is the very goal of Buddhism: nirvana, “extinction.” It is the goal of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism: moksha, “release.”

The afterlife, on the other hand, Christian, pagan, Hindu, or Buddhist, implies judgement and just punishment. This cannot be comforting to those conscious of having done wrong. And, according to Christian teaching, we are all worthy of condemnation; nobody can assume salvation.

Remember Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come..

 

It is he who denies the afterlife who is indulging in wishful thinking—whistling past the proverbial graveyard.

Beyond the voice of universal authority, there is empirical evidence—scientific evidence--here and now of the immortality of the soul.

First, it is all but conclusively proven by some “Near Death Experiences” that consciousness continues after physical death, and in the absence of detectable brain activity. There are also examples of people with virtually no brain tissue who nevertheless are conscious and can function normally—suggesting that consciousness is not dependent on the physical brain. The brain may only be, more or less as Descartes suggested, a conduit between consciousness and the physical world, more or less as the eye or hand is. Second, “ghost stories” are common all over the world: encounters with disembodied souls.  Many are purely empirical accounts: people see things, people hear things, people feel things. If we do not accept these claims, or accept the simplest explanation for them, isn’t it often only for the unscientific reason that they do not fit materialist preconceptions? They are common all over the world: encounters with disembodied souls. And note that we do not, on the whole, find ghost stories comforting. Believing in an afterlife is not wish fulfilment. Our most natural reaction is fear. 

Hamlet suggests the analogy of sleep and dreams. We know that consciousness persists when the senses shut down in sleep. Why wouldn‘t it persist in physical death, when the senses shut down permanently? We all have the experience of consciousness continuing without our physical senses. By contrast, do any of us have any kind of empirical experience of ceasing to exist?

In our experience, sensed objects die or decay or disappear, but thoughts do not. I see a hummingbird at my feeder. After a few minutes, he is gone. Nevertheless, I am still able to see a hummingbird in my mind. Everything is immortal in memory, in thought form: sensations, thoughts, emotions, urges. We may no longer feel the emotion. We may no longer consent to the idea. Yet we can still summon them to consciousness; we are aware of them.

You might object that memories too fade over time. Perhaps this is what Buddhists are counting on. But is it true? Over time, we may have trouble retrieving a particular memory; but it does seem it is always still there somewhere. The taste of a madeleine, as Proust relates, can bring it all back vividly. A smell, a familiar melody—returning to a place. Wilder Penfield could stimulate vivid memories with electric probes.

So it looks as though all things, once created, continue to exist forever in some metaphysical place, the “storehouse memory,” or “storehouse consciousness,” to use the Buddhist phrase. This is perhaps also where abstract eternal concepts reside: the truths of mathematics or logic, the concept of justice, moral good and evil, beauty, truth, and so forth. Plato’s realm of ideal forms, the Bible’s Kingdom of Heaven. 

Berkeley pointed out that this realm is more immediate, clear, and certain than the physical world. The existence of the physical world is a mere hypothesis, and an unnecessary one. As Christians, we hold it to be real, on authority. Most cultures do not.

We are immortal souls, temporarily housed in human bodies. At the end of time, we will again be housed in physical bodies, but perfected ones.

Butterfly Dreams

 

In the 4th century B.C., Chuang-tzu asked the question. “Am I a man who dreamt last night of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?”

Has anyone satisfactorily answered this question?

Descartes asks himself the same question:

“At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and perceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as does all this. But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream.”

We pinch ourselves to see if we are awake. But of course this does not work. It should be entirely possible to pinch ourselves in a dream.

Descartes ultimately resolves the question by proposing that God, being by definition all-good, would not delude us; and so what we perceive as clear and distinct must be the reality. And we perceive daily reality, he says, more clearly and more distinctly than we do our dreams.

But does this work?

To begin with, is it obvious that we experience our daily lives more clearly and distinctly than we do our dreams? Or is this just our perception when we are awake? How clearly do we remember how clear and distinct our dreams were, when we are awake? For that matter, how clearly do we remember how clear and distinct our daily life is when we are dreaming? Aren’t dream worlds perfectly clear and distinct while we dream, and our “real” daily life, if we are aware of it at all, vague and distant?

And even if this is so, even if dreams are less clearly perceived than the turnips we had at lunch, doesn’t Descartes’s own logic argue that the world of dreams is also real? Others can lie to us; we can lie to ourselves, causing delusions. We can misinterpret what we see, and mistake a reflection for an oasis. But dreams come neither of our own free will or from others. Nor do they involve the interpretation of some sense perception, introducing human error. While we might also misperceive this or that in a dream, why would God allow them to systematically deceive us?

By Descartes’s logic, he would not. And I do not think anyone else has ever given a batter response to Chuang-tzu. If we accept the world of our senses as real, as referring to a real place, we apparently must accept that the world we perceive in our dreams is also real, referring to a real place. God would not so deceive us.

Most human cultures, at all times and places, have accordingly assumed so. Dreams are either the language in which God talks to us, or they are a window into a real, objectively existing spiritual realm. Or both.

This explains the fact that the images that appear to us in dreams are not arbitrary, but predictable. Although dragons do not occur in the sensed world, the dragon is familiar to cultures all around the world. So is the phoenix, the unicorn, the sea monster, and so forth. Wherever the Greeks or Romans conquered, they had no trouble identifying the local gods as versions of their own gods. Jung traced the same motifs in the dreams of his Zurich patients and in ancient texts from India and elsewhere. He called these archetypes, but never gave a clear and consistent account of where they came from. The structure of the brain?

Why not see them, with Plato, as ideal forms, eternally existent in the spiritual realm?

When Jesus said “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” or “among you,” was he referring to its imaginative perception in dreams? Are we given a foretaste of the afterlife, both heaven and hell, in our dreams? Is this where we will live after the physical world fades away, just as it is where we live every night, when we lose consciousness of the physical world around us?

I think it is the obvious assumption.

The Truth about Dragons

 

Just in case you can accept it now, let me sketch in the truth of “mental illness.”

We all live in bubbles. These bubbles are our assumptions about ourselves, the world around us, and our place in it. Call it our narrative. Outside it is the real world as it is.

We cannot, in principle, experience the real world directly. Kant, for one, has demonstrated this; so have Descartes, Berkeley, Plato. All we can do is strive to make our account of it as accurate as possible: to keep the bubble transparent.

When the bubble instead becomes opaque, like an egg shell, we have a “mental illness.” 

Madness is a matter of being relatively disconnected from objective reality. Didn’t we always know this? Hasn’t modern psychiatry only obscured this?

There are two ways the bubble can become opaque. One is if we choose to believe lies, because we find them more to our liking that the truth. Another is that those around us have been lying to us.

These two possibilities define the two opposite types of mental illness. We might call them hubris and melancholia— to avoid common psychiatric terms, which come with distracting theoretical baggage.

Notice that the hubristic type, who spins lies, is likely to produce the melancholic type, who has been lied to.

Either condition will experience grief and anxiety. The hubristic will be constantly frustrated with and in paranoid flight from reality, which does not recognize to their wishes.  The melancholic will be constantly frustrated by inconsistencies in the narrative, so that reality does not seem to make sense.

In either case, a sudden trauma can precipitate a crisis: that is, if reality suddenly disproves the accepted narrative. A crack appears in the cosmic egg. Then you get violent denial, cognitive dissonance, mental confusion, or psychosis.

The solution, in every case, is to preemptively doubt the entire narrative, and start again from first principles.

This is a terrifying thing to do. It is the ultimate leap in the dark.

Shall we?

Putting Descartes before the Horse

 

Bishop George Berkeley

I pointed out to a correspondent of late that Descartes, to arrive at his famous statement “I think, therefore I am,” had assumed a stance of radical doubt. He then realized that the one thing he could not doubt was his own thoughts, whether or not they referred to anything outside themselves. And if he was experiencing thoughts, then he existed too. It took him several further steps to come to the conclusion that the physical world existed.

And that conclusion was soon successfully challenged by Berkeley. Berkeley points out that there is no logical necessity to posit the existence of any physical world that corresponds to our perceptions, our thoughts. Therefore—Occam’s Razor—it is improper to do so.

I think I am correct in saying that nobody has successfully challenged Berkeley on that point. Most of us just live our lives ignoring it.

My correspondent reacted badly. 

Of Descartes, she wrote, “Descartes could NOT have affirmed rationally that the brain did not exist! All humans who think and behave normally have brains. No humans who do not have brains can think or behave normally. THAT much science was known to Descartes.”

Of Berkeley, she wrote that he was “delusional and lost in the ego-centricity of his right-brain so that he can no longer interact rationally with the rest of the human and physical world.”

What I see here is “cognitive dissonance”: it is a common cognitive dissonance. It is why we commonly just ignore Berkeley. The idea that the reality of the physical world is open to question is so unexpected to us Moderns that we cannot assimilate it. We simply refuse to entertain the thought.

Meaning we are all mad.

It is demonstrably true that the existence of the physical world is debatable; because it has been debated throughout history. Aside from Descartes and Berkeley, Plato and the Neoplatonists doubted its existence. It was only shadows of puppets reflected on the wall of a dimly-lit cave. The thing was so obvious to Plato that he did not even think to make an argument. And Plato has been pretty well-respected throughout the history of Western philosophy. The medieval school of philosophy called “Realism” rejected attention to the physical world in favour of concentrating only on what was “real”—that is, the ideal forms, which exist only mentally.

The Buddhist world, similarly, considers the world of the senses “maya”: “illusion.” “The power by which the universe becomes manifest; the illusion or appearance of the phenomenal world.” So does Taoism. So does Hinduism. The same insight is critical to understanding Canadian indigenous people’s traditional beliefs: far from being modern ecologists, they did not believe that nature was real. We in the modern West are actually in a minority in assuming the importance of the physical world.

Now, realizing that the physical world may not be real is pretty mind-expanding. Real or not, it is an important insight that our experience of the spiritual is immediate and undeniable, but our experience of the physical is indirect and dubious. “Scientism”—our modern pseudo-religion—has this backwards. It is a profoundly inadequate account of reality. Much or most of what we call “mental illness,” I suspect, is caused by this inadequacy. Mental illness happens when we discover our actual experience does not conform with the official world view, or we see flaws and inconsistencies in the matrix, and do not know how to interpret it. It is vital to have a bullet-proof world view—to see the world as it truly is. Our “scientistic” world view has too low a ceiling. Leonard Cohen speaks of a “spiritual catastrophe." 

Even if there is a world that corresponds to our sense-perceptions, we have a second, epistemological problem: how does it correspond, and how can we know that correspondence? Does our experience of the colour “blue,” for example, tell us anything meaningful about the external quality “blue”? Or is the real blue a chuckling demon blinking in semaphore? Do you perceive what I perceive as blue, as what I would call red if I saw with your eyes? For the first thing is mental, a thought in the mind. The second thing remains, in principle, unknown in its essence.

Philosophy is more fun than LSD. And safer. 

That Way Madness Lies

Christ Pantocrator, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Crosby, Stills, and Nash cannot remember when they first met. Two recall it as Cass Elliot’s house in Laurel Canyon. One is certain it happened at Joni Mitchell’s house.

“That’s my truth,” says Stephen Stills.

Scott Adams speaks of “filters.” Reality may be random, but you “filter” for what you want to be true.

The idea that reality can differ person to person, or that you can choose your own, is nonsensical and immoral.

To suppose that truth can differ person to person is to say that two contradictory things can both be true, in the same sense, at the same time. This is a violation of the Law of Non-Contradiction. Dispense with it, and reason is not possible. Anything you say after that is as desperately random as a stray dog howling at the moon.

To suppose that you can choose what is or is not true, is to assume to yourself ultimate power, including power over all other people. It is also the definition of insanity.

Where does this postmodern madness come from? It occurs to me that it has to do with atheism.

Chesterton observed that those who no longer believe in God will believe in anything. We are seeing this concept tested and proven: as people in America and Europe turn away from religion, they turn with utter fervor to psychology, psychiatry, scientism, Marxism, space aliens, multiverses, conspiracy theories, cosmic simulations, and so forth.

We are watching our entire civilization dissolve into pandemonium.

It is time to ask an ancient question:

If a tree falls in the forest, and there is nobody there to hear, does it make a sound?

God hears it, and so it does.

More broadly, the concept of God, or heaven, is necessary to the idea of truth; whether or not we know the truth, God knows. It is not purely subjective.

Descartes demonstrated too that the only way we can have confidence in the reality of any of our perceptions, including our sense perceptions, let alone our memories, was on the premise that God was in command, and God would not deceive.

Pull out that lynchpin, and the cosmic tent collapses.

Without God, there is no truth. For God is Truth, and Truth is God.

The Madness of Crowds

It has often been observed by interested parties other than myself that the modern right sees and appeals to people as individuals, while the modern left sees people as groups.

Add to this Nietzsche’s observation: “Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

And we have a syllogism. Conclusion: the modern left is mad. Its natural constituency is the insane. 

Suddenly, we have an explanation for Joe Biden's candidacy. They are now actually running a man transparently not in his right mind. This is who they feel comfortable with.

I suppose this sounds like a joke. I suppose a question is knocking at the monastery door, begging bowl in hand. Why are people in groups mad?

Little selfhoods are always in danger of getting out of control. They are like cats; like wilful children. Everyone has an innate desire to be better than others. For the average person, this is necessarily improbable. For everyone, it requires some serious effort. There is a natural temptation, therefore, to delusion—to believe you are better than others on any spurious grounds. Eat an apple, say, and become as gods.

For individuals, this does not work well. Others will be inclined to scorn and scoff; leading to the contrary impression that you are actually worse than others. Epic fail.

But for groups—they can all support one another in the shared delusion, as Adam could support Eve; and it begins to work. They can all reassure one another that they are as a group better than others outside the group. It becomes possible, in principle, to live most of one’s life without hearing anyone challenge your chosen delusion.

Sustaining the insanity becomes trickier, of course, as the delusions grow more extreme; and as communication improves, and you come in regular contact with more others. Jews, foreigners, Republicans, and the like.

At this point, there will be a natural urge to devalue all those outside the group. The idea of their inferiority must be emphasized. They will gradually be dehumanized, even demonized. For it is essential that they must not be listened to. They are all "racists," say, or "Fascists," or vermin of some other kind.

If they cannot be ignored, they must be silenced. If they cannot be silenced, they must be destroyed.

No doubt not all groups are mad. Some groups, if they work as intended, work to reduce ego: one thinks of religions and religious orders. 

But all groups should be approached with caution. And a butterfly net.

Born with the Gift of Laughter, and a Conviction that the World Was Mad

Plato's wine cave.

Perhaps the most important insight religion has, one of the most important bits of wisdom life can offer, is that most people are insane.

Insane in the proper sense: they do not see reality.

Plato makes this argument in his analogy of the cave. But it is also asserted in Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism. Most people live lives of illusion. Few become enlightened. Few are saved.

It is not because people are stupid. And it is not because the universe is designed by some evil genius to be deceptive.

Because dogs are obviously sane, yet we do not think of dogs as terribly smart.

Insanity is a moral issue. Modern psychiatry and psychology will do everything it can to insist otherwise; but psychiatry and psychology are insane. All insanity is what they call denial. We really see the truth, but do not want to see it. We make believe otherwise. And so our heart, our soul, our consciousness, becomes split, warring against itself. And we begin on a downward spiral.

Dogs, on the other hand, are whole-hearted. There are no filters, no internal monologues.

And this is no doubt why Jesus said not just “love God,” but “love God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” To see truth, we must be whole-hearted, as dogs are whole-hearted, as children are whole-hearted.

Dogs, luckily for them, are not moral beings. They are incapable of sin, and so incapable of this schizophrenia.

When the Buddha, sitting under the Bo tree, was on the verge of enlightenment, he was attacked by all the legions of Mara, of illusion. They tempted him; they threatened him. And he stretched down his hand to touch the Earth, and called the Earth as witness to his true merit.

His enlightenment was not a matter of figuring things out; not an intellectual feat. It was an act of moral courage.

Where does that leave those people we currently call “insane”? The bipolars, the schizophrenics?

Perhaps not sane, yet, but less insane than the rest of us. They are at least conscious of the disconnect, and struggling with it. They are dealing with the legions of Mara.

I find it difficult to watch the daily pandemic briefings by Prime Minister Trudeau. Because no answer he gives is ever honest. You see he is not saying what he thinks. Truth is to be avoided at all costs, even when there seems to be no reason to avoid it. Everything must be said to be perfectly okay, no matter what the real situation.

Trump, in the US, I find more reassuring. Or Johnson, in the UK. They might lie now and then, but often you know they are saying what they think. They are at once more honest and more sane.

For it is the same thing.

Elon Musk on Ultimate Reality

Elon Musk is right, except for his arbitrary identification of physical reality with “base reality.” Take that away, and there is no real philosophical problem. It does not matter whether what we perceive is mental or physical in origin. Ask Bishop Berkeley. Material reality is an unnecessary assumption, and in the end, as Musk points out, an untenable one.

All that really matters is whether God exists. If he does, we can be confident that our experience is ultimately meaningful. If he does not, it equally does not matter whether we perceive “base reality” or some computer simulation: either way, nothing means anything.