Good is Evil, Evil is Good
Unbalanced equations must be balanced, entropy and chaos must be resolved. If we don't do it, it will be done for us and we may not like the outcome if we don't take control.
I’m at a bit of a loss. I am lacking the intellectual tools to distill all the thoughts in my head into anything cogent or clarifying about where we find ourselves today. I keep asking myself:
How did we get to a point where logic and reason are discarded concepts and clear thinking is so rare?
I get that emotional reasoning is in vogue these days and that how strongly someone feels about a thing is the gage of how true that thing is, but you would think by now that so many narratives have succumbed to the weight of reality, people would begin to comprehend the fallacy of thinking just because I really, really, really want something to be true doesn’t make it so.
And yet polls prove there are multitudes of people who still believe Trump is a Russian asset, Hunter’s laptop is Russian disinformation, the GOP is filled with white supremacists and everything in life is constructed of racism - even math, archeology, and Daylight Savings Time.
Never mind that years of “investigations” have determined that the Hillary Clinton campaign was far more connected to the Russians than Trump ever thought about being, Hunter’s laptop is real, the Democrat Party constantly pushes racially discriminatory policies and the “everything is racist” narrative is based on nothing but trendy, politically advantageous and fallacious reasoning (or not reasoning at all, idiot “academics” who understand nothing simply say things that cannot be supported and because they are authority figures, the sheep bleat and swallow it whole).
The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant offered the proposition that man cannot stay stupid forever and should he submit to elective idiocy, he is an enemy of not only himself but all of mankind:
“A man may postpone his own enlightenment, but only for a limited period of time. And to give up enlightenment altogether, either for oneself or one’s descendants, is to violate and to trample upon the sacred rights of man.”
In other words, we ignore reality at our own peril because the world continues to turn, change is inevitable as a simple consequence of natural law. What you refuse to learn on your own, Nature will teach you…and not always in a kind or gentle manner.
While fallacious beliefs can be generally correlated to political affiliation, it is not about politics, it is about unreality and reality and how societies and civilizations can resolve the challenges of life and living together in a world where objective truths and reality exist.
I care not if you believe in God, what I care is that people understand that reason and spirituality (morality) are not separate concepts, to assure a civil society both must be invoked in concert.
Attributed to several sources is the statement that “The Devil’s most clever trick is to convince people he doesn’t exist”, however I prefer this 1836 quote from author John Wilkinson:
“One of the artifices of Satan is, to induce men to believe that he does not exist: another, perhaps equally fatal, is to make them fancy that he is obliged to stand quietly by, and not to meddle with them, if they get into true silence.”
Wilkinson adds an important qualifier to the oft mentioned statement in that he notes that it isn’t so much that people don’t believe Satan exists, it is that people believe he will not bother them if they just ignore his existence.
You must wonder how it is that American society has come to such a point that things we have always recognized as universally evil are now accepted as good and any opposition to them is called evil. We seem to be living in the times indicated by Isaiah Chapter 5, Verse 20:
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
And it is because we have discarded the harshness of reality for the comfort and softness of unreality. American society is lost, having spent the last half century shedding itself of centuries of the teaching of the moral standards of Judeo-Christian heritage and the subsequent ordering of Western civilization in conjunction with those commonly understood and accepted moral standards.
I have noted many times Kant wrote that due to the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife but for the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God’s presence empirically. He also proposed that a belief in God was a legitimate basis for governing society, writing:
“If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real.”
Perhaps technology is to blame. Perhaps generations of children succored by videogames where there is no death or no consequences for bad decisions other than dropping a level or restarting the game plays a role. Maybe it is an anonymous life lived alone and online where debates and arguments are never ended by common recognition of facts and reality and victory can be claimed in the face of defeat.
Perhaps it is the emotional reasoning that allows people to accept baseless assertions as real because their followers agree with them, I have no idea. What I do know is that it comes as no surprise that when people cannot agree on common definitions, common causes or both sides accept the possibility they could be proven wrong, we can’t solve problems.
The ages of compiled knowledge of the world simply does not support the current absurdity of our existence. The rejection of the lessons of history in favor of undisciplined thought rooted in nothing but feelings is the rejection of our own existence.
As Albert Camus said, “Just because everything is allowed does not mean nothing is forbidden.”
Satan’s greatest victory is not to convince people he doesn’t exist or that he is invisible or irrelevant if we don’t think of him, it is to confuse the human mind into uncertainty of its own morality, obscure the limits mankind has accepted as compensation for progress, and to create the unreality where evil is good and good is evil.
This is the orbit in which we have settled and one from which we must break free.
"reason and spirituality (morality) are not separate concepts, to assure a civil society both must be invoked in concert"
Brilliant
"Hath God said....?"