Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson

The war today is between reason and religion.

In America, in the west, reason comes before religion, even among the still religious. In the west, god cannot order a murder.

If you abandon reason,
you can eat shit and claim it's chocolate pudding,
you can claim that death is better than life,
you can make women wear a bag and call it freedom,
you can put the nonproducers in charge of the producers, and call it justice.

If you abandon reason, you abandon your standard and the lens to view her.


Socialism will never die for those who abandon reason, but it's already dead for those who've not.
anonymous | Email | Homepage | 05.14.06 - 5:16 pm | #

I'll be talking about that in the next post on this topic. Don't get so excited.

The thing is that we are biologically programmed to understand the universe in several ways, the most useful and by far the most accurate way being reason. But we also experience feelings and instincts from our animal self that actually were present evolutionally prior to the development of our cognitive faculties. They offer additional input for those cognitive faculties to use in their evaluation of the world--and most importantly, we are hardwired for them. We can't get rid of them and we need to know how to deal with them. Not to understand them or to ignore the information they could provide about reality would be irrational. That's all I have to say for now.
Dr. Sanity | Email | Homepage | 05.14.06 - 5:32 pm | #

This is the reason I like to read what you write. This is fascinating stuff and I look forward to your next post on the subject.
Jan | Email | Homepage | 05.14.06 - 5:43 pm | #

Maybe I read too fast, but did I pick up the thought that religion is a myth just as socialism is a myth? I'd say some "religions" are myth, or worse. But the Christianity of St Augustine, Aquinas, C S Lewis, etc stands up to reason to the nth power. If Dan Brown can sell 40 million books with major falsehoods, anyone with any real proof of Christianity as myth could sell 400 million books. And it has not been done.
Chunky | Email | Homepage | 05.14.06 - 7:31 pm | #

I think she is saying that we are hardwired to believe in something outside ourselves. If anything, I suspect that Christianity has survived because it is able to incorporate both the basic structures of the self ( grandiose self as well as the idealized object). It allows you to pursue your own happiness because the God of the New Testament wants us to be happy and to love one another. Other religions don't do as well by their believers.
CharlesJ | Email | Homepage | 05.14.06 - 9:28 pm | #

This is really good- a smogasbord of ideas, that taken together, really illuminates and defines a lot of current reality and culture.

Your remarks, "On their own, without the attenuating influence of the other line, either side is a distortion of human nature. Each side sees the other as the extreme expression of the opposite pole of the self, thus leading to the polarizing stereotypes that left and right political sides attack each other with. The extreme left (idealized other) sees all members of the right as sociopaths out to get whatever they can from the world at the expense of others; while the right sees all members of the left as the collective mob whose goal is to erase individuality and freedom. But the truth is that at the exreme left AND the extreme right there is a striking convergence of grandiosity and totalitarianism," is probably one of the moxt accurate and cogent descriptions of what influences the current political climate.

It is interesting to note (as you do) that it is the extremes of both sides- small in number, really- that wield so much influence. This is not unlike the nuances that influence the economic cycle and markets. That happens because it is human nature to equate movement with momentum. That is why ideolgues of either side predict cattle moving from one grazing field field to another will stampede.

Too many people will believe that, for any number of reasons, most of which are rooted in the various kinds of narcissim you so aptly describe.

I'll be rereading this a few times for sure.
sigmund, carl and alfred | Email | Homepage | 05.14.06 - 10:43 pm | #

> These newest embryonic nations of "misery and bloodshed" have only a limited time until they too, reach their anti-human potential. The question is why are we seeing this happening all over again, in another hemisphere; in another century?

Because, Doc, The Left lacks any form of Wisdom. That is their hallmark -- in classic "D&D" terms, the perfect lefty has an 18 Int but a 3 Wis (see Chomsky, Noam). They lack "common sense", Wisdom, whatever you call it -- the ability to learn from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

They are Bart Simpson as subject of Lisa's School Project:
"Is my brother smarter than a hamster?"
The hamster grabs for the goody, gets a shock, and scampers for cover. Bart grabs for the goody, gets a painful shock, says "OW!! Quit it!" and grabs for the goody over and over again.

They are Bart grabbing for the goody -- a perfect solution to all problems and ills, but guarded from really being "grasped" by the electric shock of totalitarian reality. But like Bart, they Just Don't Get It -- that you can't actually get the goody, you only get the shock.

The Left, thusly, never sees that the reality of their socialist fantasies is Death, Doom, and Destruction (Mostly Death). They always look past that to what Might Be If They Would Only Reach For It. And every time, they ignore the result and grab for it again.


"Karl Marx is to [leftist] economists what Khalil Gibran is to philosophers. In the real world there is no Marxist program, but inside the human brain he tickles the mood centers."
- Alexis A. Gilliland, 'Long Shot for Rosinante' -
OhBloodyHell | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 2:42 am | #

BTW, this points out where you are all wrong -- The Left doesn't lack for reason. Reason is a function of intelligence, not wisdom. They are ARMORED by reason. What they fail to do is apply GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) to their reasoning processes.

You ALWAYS have to start from premises. If those premises are shit, the result will be, of course, shit. Hence, you learn, as you mature and gain experience, to throw out the shitty premises for valid, functioning ones. This is why people are often lefties when young, but should become "conservatives" when older.

Unless you are inherently on The Left and don't learn from those mistakes.

Then you continue to reason from false premises -- like the notion that there is ANY possibility of a functioning human system which incorporates socialism or communism as its basis. It won't work, and any common sense should tell you that from experience. But they don't have any.
OhBloodyHell | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 2:50 am | #

So is there something inherent about academia that shelters the socialist psyche? Maybe its like a protective cocoon trapping those of a certain bent, thus we have professors of seemingly unnatural slant in one political direction.
steve | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 6:35 am | #

Yes, I agree - people are hardwired to believe in a "socialist myth". Narcissist? Maybe. However, I wonder if it isn't more than that - a longing of fallen angels to be restored to Eden.

If there is no God, then there is no afterlife and, therefore, Eden must be restored here on Earth... today! It's their only hope. Chesterton noted that when people stop believing in God, they wiil believe in anything. This is the common thread that runs through the socialist, environmental and Gaia movements. Not only Eden, but peoples' longing for a shepherd to take care of them and their every needs (or is this a weaning problem?). Observant Christians and Jews know who their shepherd is and His name isn't Castro, Chavez, Stalin, Mao or Hitler. Religious people are content to change society beginning one person at a time (beginning with themselves), back-to-Eden people have no choice but to change society with one convulsive revolution (out with the old, in with the new).

The fact that this longing for Eden is so universal and that human beings fail so miserably in their attempts to recreate Eden provides me with even more proof of God's existence.
Danny Lemieux | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 8:30 am | #

Seve, I agree; the professors never graduated, they never left the campus to work in the real world.
Tom TB | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 8:37 am | #

Oops, I meant "STEVE"
Tom TB | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 8:40 am | #

As I told Gagdad Bob not long ago:

The difficulty with socialism is that it makes beautiful promises and fails to keep them.

The difficulty with capitalism is that it makes unattractive promises and always keeps them.
Michael Andreyakovich | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 12:42 pm | #

Another great post.
Not sure about a lack of powerful myths of capitalism though, the American Dream for instance, that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps is still pretty well alive.
js
js | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 1:38 pm | #

Danny--your comment reminded me of a passage from Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz":

"...children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever buiding Edens--and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn't the same."
David Foster | Email | Homepage | 05.15.06 - 11:55 pm | #

Back in the late 1800s Utopian Communism was quite popular in this country. In fact Greeley, Colorado was begun as a utopian communal settlement. Many have probably heard of Horace Greeley's exhortation, "Go West, young man, go west!" Greeley was one of the sponsor's of this utopian experiment.

It took about five years for it to fall apart. What happened? Some people were willing to work longer and harder than others, but the slackers wanted their equal share. They got to quibbling over such things and soon it was each farmer for himself. Some prospered, some got by, and some failed. Oh, oh an unequal outcome. Not what was envisioned at all!

My opinion: Communism can't work, because it requires the perfection of human nature. Everyone would have to work equally hard, be selfless, and share equally in both the good and bad. Not gonna happen in my lifetime.

Of course Russia, Cuba , and such places are not really Communistic. They are dictatorships that rely on central economic planning. The equality comes when they force everyone to share the misery equally.

It's those dad gummed, pesky unequal outcomes that the Left just can't accept. It is just not........FAIR!!
Jimmy J. | Email | Homepage | 05.16.06 - 12:38 am | #

Thanks for a very interesting post.
jodetoad | Email | Homepage | 05.16.06 - 1:03 am | #

As long as envy and projection exist, socialism or something like it will exist. As you probably know from your practice, a few people can be educated so that eventually they achieve sufficient moral and intellectual self-reflection so that they will acknowledge their own infantile promptings and resolve to civilize them; but the process is long and usually works only with individuals. With masses, especially once the confessional religions lose authority, the task becomes virtually impossible. Self-defense then becomes the only viable resort for Western nations, a strong military and the political will to employ it when necessary.
Gilbert L. Brahms | Email | Homepage | 08.12.06 - 9:10 pm | #

I regret to say our understandings of reason are very poor. It is as likely as not to produce results counter to what is truthful or productive.
'Reason is a light rider, and easily shook off. And in spite of Pride, in erring Reasons's spite, one truth is clear, What is, is right.
Life eludes logic, and everythig that logic alone constructs remains forced, for reason is always a kind of brute foce; those who appeal to the head intead of the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of touching a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future, It's advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.'
Inotherwords, freedom is less to do with reason than experience. We use reason to asses and organize our experience. It is socialism that makes reason it's first god, and the police force to make you agree with it.
james wilson | Email | Homepage | 11.09.07 - 2:25 pm | #

Reason does not impel our impressions and our actions; it follows them; we can only find truth with logic if we have already found truth without it.
All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

Wisdom is not in reason, but in love. Contempt for human nature is an error of human reason.
The love of liberty is the love of others, the love of power is the love of ourselves.

Kirk, Gide, Johnson, Hazlitt,Vauvenarques
james wilson | Email | Homepage | 03.14.09 - 1:09 pm | #

Just a thought, but isn't ascribing psychiatric labels to politcal ideologies a rather crude and arbitrary, not to mention cheap, means of gaining some sort of "medical" authority over political matters?

I mean I could easily say, for example, that the image of the Twin Towers on your website represents American "phalic" power being undermined and causing major damage to your narcissism which then provokes a reaction of compartmentalising political elements which you see as "threatening" - so-called "left-wingers" and "Democrats" which probably aren't that much of a threat to your country, but which may be to your narcissism.

I could say all this, and it sounds rather spicy... but it's fairly meaningless, because it merely avoids actual political and social issues and simply launches an attack, a rather refined attack mind you, ad hominem... just a thought, but maybe the psychology should be left in the consulting room.
Philip Pilkington | Email | Homepage | 08.21.09 - 2:11 pm | #