The Underlying Reality of the Current Moment

The murders of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska still physically sicken me. But this morning I have a new sense of calm. This was the last lunge of a dying beast. Charlie was killed because he won the debate. There may be further violence, we cannot let down our guard, but we are now in the mopping-up phase..

The trans movement is dead.

Materialism is dead.

Scientism is dead.

Islamism is dead.

Multiculturalism is dead.

Climate change is dead.

The powers and principalities of this world are in panic.

The materialist demons who inspired Iryna's murderer are in panic.

Christianity has won; or Judeo-Christianity.

The culture war is won. 

The evil is exposed, and the majority is repulsed by it. And we know who the ultimate baddies are now. There is moral clarity.

The Narcissists Speak

 

The audio conversation between the killer of Iryna Zarutska and his sister is available online. And it is striking that the killer shows no remorse. If he really did it in a fit of insanity, he should now be deeply remorseful for the poor innocent woman. Instead, he is concerned that the government must figure out what alien material is in his body that made him do this. The death of another human being just does not matter.

The killer of Charlie Kirk too showed no remorse in messages sent after the assassination. He was joking about it with his friends. No concern, even if he really thought Kirk’s views were dangerous, that innocent children had been left without a father. No sense of what the loss of Charlie Kirk might mean to the many who followed him.

And the same is alarmingly true for many people who have been openly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. Somebody is compiling a growing list of 50,000 who did so online. You have probably seen this yourself.

Can you imagine people celebrating openly when JFK was shot? Did anyone celebrate openly when MLK was shot? When John Lennon was shot? Even when Mussolini died, Churchill condemned the killing.

Something has changed.

What has changed is an epidemic of narcissism. There are a lot of them; now we see this plainly. They see other people as no more than objects. Only their own feelings matter. They have no empathy for anyone else.

The good news is, these events, the killings of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, are revealing them to us, and the general public sees what they are. And, even better, in many cases there has been instant pushback: people are losing their jobs and being ostracized for this.

Yes, this is “cancel culture”; but turnabout is fair play. It is reminiscent of the turning against Robespierre and the Jacobins in Revolutionary France.

The Motive Behind the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

I had been puzzled over the motive behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination. There was no sign of mental illness. There was no prior criminal record. The assassin was not some desperate loser like Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan whose only hope of fame was to kill someone famous. This guy had been an A student. Why did he kill Charlie Kirk?

Now it makes sense.

It turns out he had been living with a trans lover. Now it makes sense. He was necessarily part of the “LGBTQ community; although he was probably not sure himself which letter properly referred to himself. His “trans” “partner” initiated him into the trans ideology, and he had to embrace it to be in that relationship. And the trans ideology is in effect extreme narcissism: the idea that one’s personal will must override biology, mut override physical reality itself. This is in effect an assumption of godlike powers, the right to control reality. 

God naturally also has the right to kill; God kills all of us, after all, sooner or later. As God, the assassin could kill or destroy anyone who stood in his way.

Charlie Kirk denied he had the right or ability to control the world. So Charlie Kirk had to die.

Transgenderism is endemic in the culture now because he conviction that you are God is endemic in the culture now. A recent Facebook post--from a close acquaintance and in a sense a friend!-- expressed the common New Age sentiment. I encounter it at least monthly, it not daily, in Canada. I quote:

“We are divinity itself…we are here to take FULL responsibility for Ourselves, we are the ones we've been waiting for, we are here to save Ourselves…We are the manifestations of Source expressing and experiencing itself in the form of Infinite Many-ness. We are already ‘That.’ … There is no God outside of you. It is nonsense to worship that with you are a literal living, breathing expression of... It's a mind control program propagated to keep the masses feeling less then, keeping them disempowered and continuously beLIEving that ‘God’ or ‘the power’ is ‘out there’ - It's all nonsense, tools of control.”

Here is a whiff here of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism: “tat tvam asi,” “Brahman-atman.” But Vedantic Hinduism has been mostly superseded in India itself by devotional Hinduism: it has over the centuries lost the competition of ideas even there. It is of course incompatible with Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; and with Buddhism. 

And with Western paganism.

This is the sin the ancient Greeks called “hubris”: thinking you are a god. Bad news: it leads inevitably to madness and disaster on a social scale. It was also a crime in Athenian law; it was understood to lead automatically to the abuse of others. 

It is moreover the original sin with which Satan tempts Eve: “when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And it is Lucifer’s own original sin. From this sin all other sin emerges.

It is also an untenable claim. As Descartes pointed out in his Meditations, it is immediately obvious to us that it is false.

“If I were independent of every other existence, and were myself the author of my being, I should doubt of nothing, I should desire nothing, and, in fine, no perfection would be wanting to me; for I should have bestowed upon myself every perfection of which I possess the idea, and I should thus be God.”

And this, however much the narcissist might wish it, is transparently not so. We know we do not know everything; we know we make mistakes. We know we cannot fly. We know things happen to us that are unexpected, even against our will. 

Hence the inevitable retreat into bitterness, anger, depression, and hostility towards the universe. And to violence towards others.

There is another emotional issue with the belief that we are God: it leaves us alone in the universe. I recall Ramakrishna’s emotional objection to monism: “I want to taste sugar. I don’t want to BE sugar.” There is no possibility of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which is the entire point of existence. God is love, and now there is no one to love, and so no love, and no God.

We must pull out of this tailspin. 

The Tell-Tale Heart

 

I am not a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. To me, his writing is over the top—fear-jerking, cheap thrills.

But I just went through “The Tell-Tale Heart” with a student, and I think Poe may have a lead here on the true nature and cause of what modern psychiatry calls “paranoid schizophrenia.” 

In the story, the narrator is driven to psychosis by a guilty conscience. And not only guilt over murdering an old; he murders the old man in the first place out of guilt. A bad conscience made him imagine the old man saw into his soul and was judging him.

Poe does not tell us what he feels guilty about in the first place; but the clue is his insistence throughout the tale that he is not mad. He is more concerned about this than about being convicted of murder—he is resisting the obvious insanity defense. Why?

Out of pride. It is literally vitally important to him to convince the reader that his version of reality is the correct one. He must have the ability to impose his will on reality, and not concede to it.

In other words, a schizophrenic is a narcissist overwhelmed by his guilty conscience.

This is consistent with a mystery I read of a long time ago, in a book about Florida’s “death row.” It claimed that virtually everyone on death row seemed fully insane, delusional. Even though they were all judged sane and able to stand trial when they were convicted. And this included contract killers, mob killers—people who did it professionally, as a job. It seems implausible that such people were psychotic at the time they committed their crimes; a psychotic cannot plan well enough for a mob hit. 

Possibly the fear of death drove them mad; but most of us see death coming at the end of our lives, and do not go mad expecting it. It seems more likely the psychosis was provoked by having the chance to meditate over their former deeds.

M. Scott Peck, and Robert Fleiss, have both observed that narcissists when challenged can become psychotic. After all, their everyday assumptions, if examined closely, are already delusional. They all secretly think they are better than everyone, a Napoleon, or the god Siva, or the virgin Mary, or the promised Messiah. They will delude themselves with ideas of their own exceptional talents: like Poe’s narrator boasting of his extremely sensitive hearing, and of how clever he was in how he committed the murder and hid the body. This is how narcissists talk.

Shake them up enough, and the mask they wear to hide these assumptions from others slips. They openly declare themselves Napoleon, or Siva, or the Virgin Mary.

Paranoia comes with schizophrenia. Paranoia is itself a clear expression of egotism. It is the belief that everything is about you. Someone on the television is speaking directly to you. The CIA is trying to control you—obviously, they consider you that important. Everything is a message for you personally.

This is all the opposite of depression, which is caused by a sense of inferiority.

But in either case, the obvious and necessary cure is the same: to bring God and submission to God into the mix. 

The Murder of Charlie Kirk

In the face of the death of Charlie Kirk, I am consoled by the ancient saying, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church”; and by the more modern saying, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." 

Some fear this will make public discourse impossible; and America will of necessity dissolve into general violence. 

I am hopeful that, instead, this might be the tipping point beyond which no decent person will admit to being on the woke left. The moral high ground counts for everything; and the left has now lost it decisively. 

I see signs of this. MSNBC fired their analyst Matthew Dowd within hours for commenting on air that Kirk deserved to die for his supposed “hate speech.” And they issued a public apology. U of T professor Ruth Marshall posted on social media “Shooting is honestly too good for so many of you fascist c–ts.” And has already been placed on leave.

Whether the left has developed a conscience or not, businesses know how their bread is buttered. They have belatedly gotten the message that the public mood has changed. They have learned the lesson of Bud Light, Disney, Target, and Cracker Barrel. Nobody wants to be next.

And the fact that some leftist has resorted to murder shows that Kirk won the argument. So they had to silence him. But did this work with Martin Luther King? Mahatam Gandhi? Socrates? Jesus Christ?

When they fight you, then you win.

I suspect that, two years from now, nobody will admit to ever having been “woke” or voting for Kamala Harris.

The Murder of Iryna Zarutska

Although barely being mentioned by the US legacy media, the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte LRT is all over the internet. This is because it resonates with the moment; it is deeply symbolic. It is of a piece, I think, with the current violent uprising against the government in Nepal. Ordinary people have had enough, and are ready to rise against wokery in all its forms. It is about being fed up with censorship and government propaganda and misinformation and suppressing the truth. The video of the innocent white woman suddenly being stabbed to death by a black man, unprovoked, expresses visually and incontrovertibly something we have all known to be true, but forbidden to say, for years.

Anti-white racism is the real problem. 

Beyond that, government contemptuous of and hostile to the common people is the real problem.

The one point I would add to the ferment is that this is not about mental health. The lame common excuse that the killer was let down by the system in not being given “help” is diabolically wrong.

Stop and think for a moment. Claiming that mental illness leads to violence is a grave slander against the mentally ill. They suffer enough already. It is like saying lepers are violent, or cancer victims are violent.

It also denies them the dignity of human agency. It excuses all attempts to control them and ignore their concerns. It treats them as lesser beings. It might even eventually excuse their extermination.

The mentally ill are no more violent, statistically, than the general population.

Moreover, whenever it is revealed that this or that killer is mentally ill, this also reveals that they have been through the system, in order to have that diagnosis. They have already been given whatever “help” the mental health system has to offer. The problem is that the mental health system does not know how to help; throwing more money after it is money wasted.

And as a matter of simple justice, the mentally ill must be held responsible for violent actions against others. Otherwise it is easy for anyone of malicious mind to use this as cover. It is like saying “the devil made me do it.” It is an abdication of responsibility, and in itself is gravely immoral. This is why, historically, the Church has resisted most claims of demonic possession. 

The devil can tempt; he cannot force you to do the thing. You still have your own conscience and judgement.

I can imagine someone hallucinating that they are being attacked by aliens or devils or other hostile forces and needing to defend themself. I can see this happening if police advance on a schizophrenic, for example, with their uniforms and their weapons; or doctors or male nurses in white coats. 

But that cannot be maintained in this case. The poor woman was sitting there minding her own business. The killer felt malice, and acted on malice.

His presumed insanity is no defense.

Solving the Health-Care Crisis

The Commonwealth Fund’s annual health policy survey has ranked Canada very poorly among 31 high-income countries with universal health care for timely access to services.

How to fix our health-care crisis?

The obvious first move is to abandon the odd political shibboleth that we must not permit private care. “No two-tier health care.” Why not? Canada is the only universal-care country that severely restricts private options. In Britain, the rich are publicly shamed if they resort to the public system.

As a practical matter, the Canadian rich currently often head down to the States for private care. This is an unnecessary travel expense for them, and it drains money from the Canadian economy.  Better to let private firms set up in Canada. The rich will be able to “jump the queue,” but as a result, the queue will be shorter for everyone. To object is mere self-destructive envy.

Then if a privately-run clinic or hospital can provide a service for less than the public system does, as may well be the case, the government plan too should cover the private option. 

Most of what doctors do, however, is diagnosis, and prescribing pills. AI can already diagnose and prescribe more accurately than a human doctor. Accordingly, we need much less training than we currently demand for a medical doctor; all we really need is basic computer competence. We need nurses, dispensing pharmacists, and technicians to run the diagnostic machines. We do not really need doctors.

We should also institute a nominal fee, a deductible, for a doctor or hospital visit, to discourage unnecessary use: say $5.

And we should not cover unnecessary non-health procedures like sex changes or abortions.