Dennis Prager Itemizes My Great Reaction

Dennis Prager recently put out a piece "The Four Horsemen of America's Apocalypse." That is:

1. Victimhood: "People who think of themselves as victims feel that, having been victimized, they are no longer bound by normal moral conventions -- especially the moral conventions of their alleged or real oppressors.
2. Demonization: "demonizing a group as inherently evil."
3. A Cause to Believe In: "The need for meaning is the greatest human need after the need for food. Leftism, with all its offshoots -- feminism, environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, antifa -- has filled that vacuum."
4. Lies: "Lies are the root of evil."

Of course, I interpret this through the lens of my Great Reaction idea. That the left is a lurch back to the primitive.

Thus, of course the left deals in victimhood. As I keep quoting, from Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

Right. So the troubles of the poor are all the fault of the corporations, or the whites, or something. For Hitler, the poor suffering Germans were the victims of the Jews. "There is always a fault at the bottom of it."

Thus, of course the left deals in demonization. This goes back to the notion of the scapegoat that was given a recent push by René Girard. The point of the scapegoat is to unite the community and put all of its divisions and arguments on a single person or group and then banish them from the community.

Thus, of course the left comes up with a succession of causes, socialism, feminism, climate change: a cause to believe in. We all are tormented by the need to know the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." That is what religion -- and science -- are all about. They are an effort to try and figure out what the heck is going on in this town, this world, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe.

Notice how the boundary of the Will to Know keeps expanding. Used to be that people were really concerned about the spirits in the local trees. Then they started worrying about the moon and the sun and the stars that revolved across the sky. Then they started worrying about the Sun as the center of the solar system. Then the Sun as just a medium star in the galaxy. Then galaxies in a universe of galaxies.

I predict that one day we will be worrying about a universe, or multiverse, or something, bigger than our current Big Bang created universe.

Thus, of course the left deals in lies. Because the lie is the shortcut to the truth. In truth, the truth is unknowable, or at least unfathomable. And all religions, philosophies, cultures, narratives are a shortcut to the truth. All of them, therefore, are lies. The only response is the classic line of Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken," that all knowledge, all ideas, all everything is incomplete, less than the truth. And that the beginning of wisdom is to understand that, deep in your bowels.

Now I maintain that the modern age is an astonishing miracle, that has repressed -- in the sense of Schopenhauer and Freud -- the basic primitive instincts that Dennis Prager listed. The point is that we can't have our larger society, our market economy, our multicultural cities, unless people repress their basic human instincts, to think that "someone is to blame," to want to punish the scapegoat, to believe, to jump to a cheap explanation that justifies your action.

But, you would expect, our ascent from the dusty plain to the current heights would not be without incident and setback. And, as new-age philosopher Ken Wilber has written, when things go wrong we regress to our old ways and consciousness. Of course we do. If our new ideas seem to falter we go back to what is old and familiar.

And that is why we have the left. Because there is a constant nagging feeling that in all our progress and modernity we have lost something, something that we imagine we used to have in the old community. Thus the left's nostalgia for the solidarity of olden days. Only, of course, life then was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

And you tell me why the left, that imagines itself a movement of rebellion against the injustices and repressions and intolerance of the modern age, is so devoted to political power and fault and vengeance.

It could be because they are idiots.