Exiled to the Twenty First Century
Imagine you came across a group of little men playing ninepins, who hexed you into an enchanted sleep. Upon waking, and finding yourself with a long, gray beard, you explored the strange country around you.
The new nation is called the Twenty First Century. It looks somewhat like the country from which you had been exiled, but that similarity makes the strangeness all the more galling.
That is precisely what happened to me. And I curse the little men, not merely because they took from me so much I loved, but imposed upon me exile into a place whose language is strange, whose manners are barbaric, and whose customs are abhorrent, not just to decency, but to sanity itself.
The Twenty Firsters speak what sounds like English, but there are many nonsense words, or words that mean the opposite of English words. For example, instead of saying ‘sex’ they say gender, which is a part of speech. Instead of dating the calendar from by the year A.D., which means Anno Domini, they date it from C.E., which means nothing. Instead of saying ‘man’ to refer to human beings, and using ‘he’ in the correct grammatical form (unless the antecedent is or must be female, he is used) Twenty Firsters use ‘they’ or ‘he/she’ or ‘ae’ or some other circumlocution.
They are afraid of something called ‘hate speech’, which is nowhere defined or explained. Nothing is defined or explained in this new nation called the Twenty First Century. Under the theory that words expressing dispraise or discontent with any special, protected group will cause spontaneous physical violence to manifest from nowhere against that group, the Twenty-Firsters have made not the violence illegal, but the speech.
A man from my country would realize, of course, that this is the same argument once used by the pro-totalitarian monarchist Thomas Hobbes to justify censorship. A man from my country would be aware of centuries of political philosophy since the time of Hobbes’ writing which had thoroughly exploded and discredited the Hobbesian theory.
But the Twenty-Firsters neither read Hobbes nor any philosophy.
Intellectual effort requires precision and diligence of thought, and they are a spontaneous and unthinking peoples, trained by four years or more of higher education to despise all attempts at thinking as sinister, or vainglorious, or futile, or all of the above.
The strangeness of the strange new country for a long while hides, beneath its harlequin face-paint, a truly hideous visage, akin to the malefic vision of the face of hell. One does not see how bad it is at first glance, because a natural decency and sense of goodwill makes it hard to believe the lunatics mean their lunacy to be taken at face value.
Let us pause to reflect upon a few examples, taken in no particular order.
Our first example comes from across the sea. Apparently there is a traditional character from A.D 500 from Santa Claus lore in Holland and Germany called ‘Black Pete’ or Zwert Peit. He is the apprentice and servant of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) whom Father Christmas sends down the smoky chimneys to place the gifts under the Christmas tree. He is called Black Pete because he is covered in soot.
But the Twenty Firsters find the character offensive because he reminds them of a Negro. The Twenty Firster cannot discriminate between a white man covered in soot and a Negro.
Now, they are not offended because a Negro is present in a charming and inoffensive children’s tale from the Middle Ages. They are offended because having a sooty assistant reminds them of the Arab slave trade, which is one of the great offenses marring the conscience of history, and a shocking example of man’s inhumanity to man. So the Twenty Firsters are up in arms about Santa’s apprentice, crying for boycotts, firing, and laws against ‘hate speech’ in order to suppress and punish this horrible, terrible, unendurable….
Ah, no, my mistake. The strangeness of the new country has again deceived me. The vast Arab slave trade was carried on in immense numbers between the Seventh Century until the Nineteenth. At that time, the British crown, prompted by Christian abolitionists groups, against British economic interests and solely for reasons of Christian moral righteousness, forced the Turks to put a stop to it. It is not this Eastern slave trade to which the foes of Santa Claus object.
The Twenty Firsters are utterly oblivious to this Arab slave trade, blissfully unaware of it. It does not exist in their tales, myths, history, or thought. No, only the somewhat smaller slave trade carried on by Spaniards and, later, in even smaller volume, by British, concerns them.
In the new country of the Twenty First Century, one sees this pattern endlessly repeated: no evil is ever criticized because it is evil, only if it is an evil done by Christians. Any evil done by Mohammedans, Heathens, Pagans and barbarians is regarded as excusable, if not admirable, even if it is precisely the same act. Logic is not the strong suit of the Twenty Firsters.
The age of the character of Zwart Piet is disputed, but good authority says he dates back to the Sixth Century. At this time in the Christian held lands of Europe, there was no slave trade worthy of mention. The Roman practice of keeping slaves had been largely wiped out by the Christians by that time. So it is not logically possible for this character to represent a Negro slave, any more than he could represent a Guru from Tibet or a Mandarin from Peking, because such creatures were not in the public consciousness.
Nonetheless, the Twenty Firsters do not base their crusades on facts, only on feelings, and their feelings are under no obligation to be proportionate, healthy, apt, or related to reality. They are only feelings about hallucinations.
The second example confirms this. In this new country, if you type the words ‘Girls in Love’ into the image search on Google, for example, the response will hold more pictures of lesbians than pictures of a boy with a girl. The sexual aberration is regarded not only as normal by the Twenty Firsters, but as something worthy of celebration, admiration, and awe.
The idea that homosexual attraction is illogical is nowhere breached nor discussed among them. You see, to the Twenty Firsters, the erotic desire in and of itself, regardless of its object, is regarded as always praiseworthy, even (or especially) when is between two organisms unable to form a sexual dyad and therefore, you know, actually have sex.
For them, sex is only good when it is not sex.
Sex that is sex, that is, chastely within the bounds of matrimony while trying to have a baby, is despicable. They hate virgins, but that hate mothers more, and hate innocent babies most of all, and kill them in astronomical numbers prenatally.
The idea that sex requires two sexes is likewise dismissed without discussion: to them, sex is the emotion or the stimulation of the sex organs, not the use of the sex organs for sexual purposes. It would be as if they spoke of eating and used the same word for the act of putting eatable and inedible substances in the mouth, and spoke of vomiting and digestion as one and the same.
In any case, the whole topic is, by consensus of the Twenty Firsters, placed entirely beyond the realm of allowed discussion. Anyone asking polite and honest questions about the nature of sex, its proper and healthy functioning, and its relation to reality, is dismissed, harassed, attacked, savaged, denounced and anathematized. Homosexuality is holy and righteous and good to the Twenty Firsters, pure and noble beyond all criticism and question, except when Catholic Priests engage in it, in which case it is a hideous crime.
Why this double standard? Again, logic is not the strong suit of the Twenty Firsters.
This confusion of the sexes extends to beyond the sex act itself. The Twenty Firsters celebrate their democracy by having five out of nine unelected members of the Supreme Court arbitrarily and unilaterally decide that marriage, unlike what it has been in all law and custom since before the invention of writing, shall hereafter be merely an expression of erotic desire regardless of the number, sex, or species of the sex object. At the moment, marriage has been extended merely to sodomites, but there is nothing in the legal logic involved which can allow the courts to draw any sort of distinction between this and polygamy, pederasty, incest, or any other aberration.
In the country from which I come, the Supreme Court was limited to clarifying conflicts of law between the United States and the several states, and deferred to State Law on matters of marriages, and any opinion had to be bound to some clear precedent.
In the new country, the Supreme Court does what it pleases without limit or bounds, and it defers to nothing.
But in this case, sex is what the Twenty Firsters have instead of God. Sex absolves all sins, forgives all abrogation of solemnest vow, excuses the dismemberment of family and imposing permanent emotional scars on one’s own children, and excuses the dismemberment and murder of those children in the womb.
At the same time, sex is dismissed as trivial, too trivial to discuss, and anyone asking any honest questions about the differences between men and women is regarded as a dangerous crackpot, if not a blaspheming heretic.
This derangement on the topic of sex renders the Twenty Firsters unable to write stories, plays, or films in which males or females are portrayed in an honest, or an interest, or a dramatic fashion. A ghastly pall of boredom, like a stick smog, hangs over every work of art they produce.
A single example of countless will have to do: In the movie version of A PRINCESS OF MARS, for some unaccountable reason called JOHN CARTER, a Virginia gentleman and survivor of the Civil War, who, on Mars, is stronger than any other man on the planet, steps in front of the space princess menaced by the ferocious green Martians, who are tusked and titanic monsters excelling in their savagery. She snorts at him in contempt, and, in a moment of slapstick comedy, yanks out a snickersnee and begins cutting open green Martians like a barkeep peeling lemons for cocktails. At one go, the story makes the Martian savages no sort of threat, since even half-clad young girls are perfectly safe among them, makes the woman no one who any real woman can be like and no real man would want to be near, and makes the superhumanly strong male lead a comedy relief character whom no man would want to be like and no woman would want. Since there is no danger to the woman, and no point to the hero, and no menace from the savages, there is no tension, no drama, and no plot, and the moral of the story young men take away is that men are wimps and woman are rude and that offering to save someone else from rape, slavery and death is rude and useless and makes you look like a fool.
The writers evidently are seeking to put one over on the viewers, as if by pretending hard enough that the obvious reality obviously staring anyone in that situation in the face is treated as beneath mention, the obvious reality softy and suddenly vanishes away, like a baker beholding a boojum.
In the art and literature of the Twenty Firsters, the princess fights the dragon, and the prince is a villain.
The belief that sex has nothing to do with sexual reality extends to other areas, and is not restrained by pragmatism, common sense, or any sense of danger. For example, the desire to inject young girls into front line combat with enemies so that they can be exposed to stress beyond their emotional or physical capacity to bear, and be captured by terrorist enemies, and repeatedly raped on video, is so great a desire among the Twenty Firsters that merely waiting for females to volunteer is insufficient. Even now, steps are afoot to force the eighteen year old daughters of all able bodied citizens to sign up for the selective service. This is not a comedy by Aristophanes (whom the Twenty Firsters have never read, and whose name they do not recognize) but a sober reality promoted at the highest level of leadership.
The belief that art has nothing to do with reality likewise has been extended to the point where it is beyond satire, beyond even description. Certain items are put on display in public art museums, as art, which I cannot describe to my children. Others are absurd for the sake of absurdity, shocking for the sake of shock-value, dull for the sake of dullness.
Case in point: a young man put his eyeglasses on the floor of an art museum in San Francisco and stood back. Within moments, the refined museum-goers, with their expert and discriminating tastes in aesthetics, began gathering around, photographing, and exclaiming over the pair of glasses. Their discriminating taste were unable to discriminate between art and litter.
Again, the belief that law has nothing to do with reality has created an ongoing corruption of what was once a free nation. Professors are now publicly coming out against free speech: they dismiss the concept of free speech as the sinister attempt of capitalists to oppress the unfortunate.
The Supreme Court routinely justifies, upholds and rewrites laws that have no constitutional authority nor any precedent in the case law. The Congress routinely spends taxpayer money without a budget, which is a clear violation of the Constitution. The executive routinely gives executive orders for which there is no constitutional authority, and enforces illegal diktats, and fails to enforce the laws as written.
All three branches of government are severely broken, and the electorate no longer composed of men capable of having a rational conversation about their difference of opinion: because one side, the Left, has dismissed the idea of rational conversations as sign of weakness. Their idea of the First Amendment is that it protects anyone shouting down, heckling and harassing a law abiding and peaceful man trying to speak ideas that unpopular or uncomfortable.
What is the source of all this madness?
They simply don’t believe in reality. If a man says he is a woman, the freakish cult belief of the Twenty Firsters proclaims that it is not only rude to correct him, but a violent invasion of his rights. By law, you can be punished if anyone patronizing your business calls him ‘him’. Likewise, if a white woman says she is a Red Indian, no one dare upbraid her.
This freedom from reality allows them to indulge in the most fanciful crusades against utterly imaginary oppressions, while, of course, leaving all real social problems not only unsolved and unaddressed, but actually made worse by counterproductive efforts.
You find this more the more you encounter the more highly educated. Professors of economics, for example, believe in the theory of the Iron Law of Wages, even though both theory and history has disproven this theory as thoroughly as any theory can be disproven.
The Twenty-Firsters have no families, merely temporary alliances they call families, which consist of a mother and a father, but somehow also include mothers with no fathers, two fathers, two mothers, or a polygamy, or a merely a group of friends sharing expenses. There is no way in their laws to bind oneself to a wife with an unbreakable bond: the woman can, at any time, for any reason or no reason, declare the marriage over, and obtain the legal right to half the husband’s income or more. She may also kill his children in the womb at her sole discretion up to and including the time of birth, even if the child is perfectly healthy and poses no danger to her, without his consent, and without even the courtesy of a polite note telling him the child he has been decorating the nursery to receive is being dismembered in hideous pain, its brains sucked out through a tube, and its parts and organs cannibalized for resale.
They have no fine art or poetry: their modern museums are filled with mind-jarring rubbish which even to describe sounds like a parody. There is some art left in the popular arts, but that is ebbing.
They have no civics, no sense that liberty is worth preserving, and no desire to be free of dependency on the government.
The operation of their government is the opposite of yours and mine from the nation we once knew. The nation you lost was one where the government sought to preserve the rights of man from invasion, and to maintain peace and prosperity for its citizens: the nation to which I woke in the Twentieth Century does everything within its power to trigger catastrophic failures in the money supply and crash the economy. The press and the president together routinely provokes race-riots as a matter of national policy. The administration provokes foreign wars by calculated shows of weakness, while inviting massive numbers of enemies, saboteurs and terrorists into the nation in astronomical numbers without even an attempt at a vetting process.
You and I come from a nation where the idea of equality, that all men are created equal, we held by everyone you knew to be a self-evident truth. No one, not a single person, was so stupid as to believe this equality extended to anything aside from natural rights, or thought that rights granted a legal ability to invade the rights of another, or draw lucre from the public coffer. Everyone had to the right to free speech, no one had the right to have the state rent him a lecture hall or broadcast studio. It was too obvious to need repeating.
Now, in this nation, the idea of equality is dismissed as too contemptable to be worthy of mention. The only argument between the two factions in the nation are whether women’s superiority over white men is greater or less than Negro superiority over white men, or whether Islamic superiority over all infidels trumps all other claims of superiority.
The idea of each individual being judged on his own merits, regardless of group-identity, is not even discussed.
The idea of the government remaining neutral, and allowing each man to rise or fall to where his natural talents, luck, and hard work bring him, is dismissed as unworthy of discussion. The government must pick the winners and reward them and punish the losers and make sure that they lose, and the only argument is over which favored group shall receive this collective benefit as a gift from the state, and which shall be punished in expatiations of utterly imaginary group guilt.
Their religion is the opposite of that celebrated in the country from which we come. Our people worshipped a holy God, a God of justice and mercy to whom each human life is sacred. They worship themselves, and their private parts, as gods and goddesses, and they never cease to speak of them. Their politicians refer to penis size in public speeches, and their women put on school plays starring their vaginas in speaking roles.
They have managed to make sex boring, first by turning it into a commodity, and second by robbing it of glamor, mystery, and romance. Now it is all porn, and the women adorn themselves as only sailors and cannibals did in times past, with nose-rings and tattoos, piercings hard to distinguish from self mutilation.
Women in this new nation regard it as shameful to be chaste, and regard virginity and motherhood with equal abhorrence. Even Venus yawns.
Imagine all this, and you will understand what has happened to me and all men of good will of my generation.
Imagine you are a stranger in a nation where everyone hates you, no one speaks your language, no one loves your nation, worships your God, and no laws protect your wife from divorce or your children from prenatal infanticide.
Everything they build is ugly. Everything they say is illogical.
And imagine that everything they say about your nation is a lie. From the television show MAD MEN to nearly everything written in this history books, even to the most trivial recounting of how many women writers there were in the science fiction pulp magazine era, nothing said about your era is true.
If a group of time traveling superheroes visits the 1950s in a story told by a Twenty Firster, he will routinely slant and distort the story to make the Jim Crow laws of the Democrat controlled South sound like the norm, rather than like an aberration of the day, and make their decency and chastity seem horrible.
Likewise, a Twenty Firster will be unable to read and understand a science fiction book taking place half a million years in the future, because the idea that our current obsessions and issues will be resolved or forgotten by then is anathema to the Twenty Firster mind.
The Twenty Firster cannot tell an honest story about the past or read a tale about the future because they are parochial to an infinite degree. They can neither understand nor tolerate someone from a culture even slightly different from their own, much less grasp the view of a stranger. And yet, they never cease to boast about, and demand from others, toleration, toleration and toleration of all things. Unless you smoke.
It is not merely the hypocrisy of these yammering ninnies that is galling, because the hypocrisy is not something as innocent and sweet as merely wearing a mask of deceit. The Twenty Firsters do not have the concept that is central to you. You care about right and wrong, good and evil, fair and foul. They only care about who and whom. Who has the power to inflict his will on whom?
To them, all human relations are power relations. There is no mutually beneficial interaction, merely endless exploiters endless oppressing endless victims.
There is no truth. If you agree with a man on any topic, it is because he is master and you are slave. If you disagree, is be because you defy him and rebel. To them, asserting any statement to be factual or truthful is an imposition, a claim to be another man’s master, a demand for subjugation. Even arguments allegedly about scientific facts, such as the relation of solar cycles to global warming, to them, are arguments about who is master.
They are concerned not with right versus wrong, but only with female versus male, black versus white, gay versus straight, pagan versus Christian. Anything and anyone their side is excused, no matter what; anything and anyone against them is condemned, no matter what.
Not even the smallest hint of fairmindedness enters any of their speech or thought. No courtesy is offered to opponent, even the idea that there are two sides to every question is alien to them.
They are barbarians.
No, barbarians are hardy and fierce, and these are soft and decayed like blind albino worms found in a rotting log. They are the yahoos Lemuel Gulliver once described.
They are indecent where your homeland was chaste and wholesome, rude and vile your where homeland was civil and restrained, imprudent and unjust in law and policy where your homeland was sound and fair, self indulgent where yours showed self command, lawless where yours was lawful, dishonest where yours was upright, ugly and dreary where yours was adorned with shining examples of art and literature, crass where yours was refined, vulgar where yours was romantic, putrid where yours was hale, impious where yours was pious.
Your home was America, a free country ruled by brave men. This is Antiamerica, a sty fit only for slaves. It is inhabited by female schoolgirls and male schoolgirls, except without the grit, common sense, modesty, good looks, and sound education of the schoolgirls you left behind back home.
Then you realize you can never go home again.
You are trapped here, among the yahoos, among the snarling fools, dullards, cowards and barbarians who inhabit the once-proud towers of a shining city, now tarnished and toppled, of ancestors whom they despise.
They cannot build or even maintain what their ancestors bequeathed upon them, the greatest fortune in history, the finest nation and more civil and accomplished civilization. All they can do is degrade, deconstruct, disparage, destroy.
They cannot land on the moon. All they can make are conspiracy theories calling the moonlanding a hoax.
Unless you are a man of extraordinary large-heartedness, you would come to hate the Twenty First century. Being born in a free century makes one particularly unable to abide life in an unfree century. Being born a free man makes one particularly unable to talk to slaves and cowards.
The most hateful thing about the Twenty-First Century is that the corruption and disgusting wickedness and the brain-dead self-satisfaction of swinish hedonists rolling in their own effluvium never, ever ceases. It crawls into every cranny of modern life, and worms its way like a disease bearing parasite into every private cranny.
The promoters of corruption are as zealous as missionaries. They are, in fact, missionaries, merely for a hellish rather than heavenly prince.
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Is there any way back to the great America you once knew? Of course there are rare signs of hope now and again: Captain America in a movie referring to God in an honest, non-ironic way, or the entrepreneurs behind Spaceship One winning the X-Prize, or landing a rocket on its tail.
But without a restoration of the Church, and a revival of the faith, without strong voices from many quarters willing to denounce what are now constitutional rights as the abominations, infanticides, and sins that they are, the path back from exile is too hard and long and tangled to see.
Only the lamps lit by you, you who are the lights of the world, can show us the way back home. If the meat is not salted, it rots. Only the salt of the world will preserve it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
