Chronophobia
As befits Good Friday, my post today is as bitter as the passover herbs. Turn and look back, all ye, at the Egypt we should flee. Freedom is a wasteland for many long and weary years of tramping: but beyond it, the river, and beyond that, the promised land flowing with milk and honey.
Being an honest gentleman not particularly brave or bold, but also not particularly interested in being lead by a lemming mob possessed by extraordinary popular delusions over the lip of an abyss into madness, I have on many occasions received comments, or, rather, white noise contorted into the shape of words, from various gibbering of poop-flinging yahoos, maudlin waifs, cringing serfs, drooling children, shrill man-boys, cocoa-sipping pajama boys, gormless Eloi, eunuchs, and nyctalope cannibal troglodyte Morlocks of the Left.
The mob dislikes anyone who does not worship the mob, their Glorious Leader, or whatever fickle idea, bright as a butterfly, that wanders through their collective empty heads during the current news cycle. They will, of course, dislike with equal disdain anyone who does not worship the brief and fugitive idol darting before their glassy and unblinking wide-open eyes tomorrow, even if the first directly contradicts the second. Logic is not their strong point.
Normally I do not mind. I am as patient as Job, and so entertain any comment that does not devolve either into swearwords or Holocaust denial. However, on two and only two occasions, the comments were so blatantly dishonest, so angry, so unrelated to reality, so starkly, shriekingly, shockingly insane, that my patience was exhausted, and the conversation could not continue.
Instead of a dialog, I was exposed to overhearing a ranting monologue addressed to an imaginary character in the ranting moonbat’s head, which the moonbat could not tell was not me, even though there was no resemblance between me and the imaginary character.
I was not permitted to testify on my own behalf to say what I believed or did not believe. THEY told me what their theory said I believed, and the tiny fact that, in non-moonbat reality, I believed no such thing — ah! That was ruled as not being evidence.
Each time I asked either moonbat to quote back to me anything I had said to justify the assertion that I believed what was being attributed to me, both moonbats simply ignored the requests. It was as if I had not spoken.
Usually, when a normal but unskilled debater falls into a straw-man argument, you can correct him, and he will not continue to argue against a position you have repudiated, and will not continue to insist you said something you did not say.
One of the two moonbats even had the effrontery to say that he did not believe me when I told him what position I held on the issue. No, his friends had read something I wrote, and so they told him what was the position I held. His friends were better witnesses of what were the thoughts in my head than was I.
For some odd reason, both outbreaks of Lovecraftian madness concerned the same topic: my attitude toward ages past.
In one case, it was the Middle Ages, and in the other, the 1950s.
I thought this an odd coincidence. What is it about the past that makes the raving moonbats so much more lunatic and noctilionine than usual?
Just for the record, my opinion is that the Dark Ages were pretty darned dark, but just not so black as Protestant Historians liked to paint them. The later parts saw the diminution of slavery and the birth of modern science, and, despite the downfall of Imperial society, technological improvement accelerated, including inventions like the clockwork, the eyeglasses, the stirrup and the wheelbarrow. Superstition, witchcraft, astrology, which every other cult and culture on earth tolerates and welcomes, Christendom alone outlawed and eschewed. By the time we reach the Thirteenth Century, we have the establishment of the University system, which is as unique a cultural product as musical notation or drawing in perspective.
Of the bad, since the bad has been so often repeated and exaggerated, I need say nothing here. But Late Antiquity (as scholars call it) was not as bad as Voltaire, Gibbon, and their epigones parrot. But I would certainly rather live now, when the Church is two thousand years old, in a civilization that has reaped the benefits of the seeds so painfully planted then, than live when the Christian Church was only a thousand years old, and the order of Franciscan monks, those young whippersnappers, had not yet been created by their founding saint.
Likewise, just for the record, I think ladies in the 1950s both commanded and deserved more respect, and even Hollywood starlets were treated like creatures possessing glamour, a word that means magic. Modern actresses and performers indulge in vulgarity deliberately meant to shock. This is not a sign of the growth of equality in women, but a sharp sign of their degeneration.
As for the bad in the 1950s, if I strain my brain I can think of a few things that were bad, but, again, things like the Democrat Jim Crow Laws or the Democrat Ku Klux Klan were overturned by Republican administrations, by the FBI, and Blacks were armed by the NRA.
As for the rest, I would rather live now as opposed to then, because this is the golden age of Science Fiction, where it is easier to write and easier to find high quality work, than it was then.
However, the Morlocks are much stronger now than then. Then, it was not considered polite in society to be a barbarian who hates his civilization, his nation, his Church, his forefathers, and who hates everything good and valuable in life. Now, it is considered impolite to be civilized. Society frowns on civility, courtesy, chivalry, bravery, manners, honesty, reason, justice, patriotism, and piety.
So, given a choice, if I could not live in the current time, I would prefer the 1950s to the Middle Ages.
And, just for the record, I find fantasy stories set in historically inaccurate versions of the Middle Ages mildly annoying. Far too often, the characters act and talk just like Southern Californians, with all the same prejudices and assumptions and democratic, egalitarian, cosmopolitan impulses as modern sexually liberated Leftwingers. The one thing honestly worth liking about the Middle Ages is usually missing, which is that the power and terror of the Universal Church, from Rome to Byzantium, which was therefore able to torture and burn witches with impunity. (Just kidding, fans, the witch-burning was a largely Protestant hobby, and practically unknown before the Reformation. Also, judicial use of torture, practiced by ancients, was outlawed by Pope Gregory I during the so called Dark Ages, and only made became renascent in the Fifteenth Century, 800 years later, during the Reformation days the Puritans and their modern epigones are so proud of.)
Also, I find fantasy stories routinely told by moonbats and Leftists about the 1950s to be so consistently false, that I am shocked they make still persuade the gullible. This is within living memory, and yet the only thing any of them remember about the 1950s are make-believe things written by Upton Sinclair or Howard Zinn.
Just for the record, I would also, naturally, prefer the current time much more if the Morlocks converted out of their malign pagan darkness and welcomed into the light of the Church; or, failing that, were domesticated and restrained to the point where peaceful coexistence with the malign hate-filled rabid monstrosities were possible; or, failing that, were found no longer in undisputed control of the megaphones of all major opinion-making institutions from media or judiciary to academia; or, failing that, were found on the shores of some area of sea which a subaqueous volcano had turned into a seething expanse, and then driven at lance point by Cossacks into the scalding waters, there to be eaten by carnivorous fish, while their wives and children were sold to Arab slavers or sent to Russian concentration camps, ironically, those same Muslims and Reds so beloved of the moonbats.
During both discussions, both moonbats insisted, over and over and over, that everything, everything, everything was better by every measure in the modern day, and that everything, everything, everything was worse by every measure in the past.
To point out anything, no matter how trivial, provoking nostalgia (such as the picturesque look of the sword versus the machine gun, or the peaceful nature of a society were uniformed young men could hitchhike across country with no fear of inhospitable motorists) to the moonbat seemed to be tantamount to being nostalgic about some Nazi death-camp from which, by underground railroad, a Jewess has recently escaped, or to someone freed by the Harrowing of Christ being nostalgic for the Eighth Circle of Hell. “Well, I had a good view of the seducers and panderers being flayed by lashes, and once a year, during Halloween, the dire worms stopped eating my entrails. Good times!”
However, in non-moonbat reality, everything has a fixed nature. A is A, a thing is what it is, and it is not what it is not. This means that from any given cause, certain effects can follow, and others cannot. This implies that there is no such thing as a free lunch, no good which offers universal value to all possible uses, no tool that performs all tasks, no panacea which cures all types of ailment. And all this means everything has a cost. Every benefit has a drawback. Every victory involves a loss.
For non-moonbats, this means that you judge that if the cost outweighs the benefit, you regret the cost, but if the benefit outweighs the cost, you pay, you take the loss, and you are glad of it. If you live on the mountaintop, you cannot swim in the sea; if you live on the sea shore, you cannot ski down the mountainslope. You cannot clear the forest for cropland while maintaining the forest for hunting game.
But there is no reason for the mountain man not to read books about the life of a sailor, and even see some benefits of that life, even though he gladly paid the cost of foreswearing life as a sailor to be a mountain man. There is no evil, and indeed much good, if the farmer also (if only in his imagination) sees the benefit of the life of a hunter, or a hunter sees the benefit of settling down to farming.
It certain is not some hellish and heretic evil to be nostalgic for whatever thing was lost to live as we do, especially if the benefits of living as we do now are not so clear nor so enjoyable as advertised. So I can regret the lost years when Detroit was not yet a Third World hellhole, while being glad that we nowadays have moonshots — except that I suppose we don’t. (Isn’t NASA nowadays tasked with telling Muslims that they did good work in mathematics, and funding studies showing the world is doomed?)
So why do the moonbats hate everything about the past so much? Why do they deceive themselves into insisting that all conservatives love everything about the past, even though, obviously, we don’t?
Here I can only offer a theory. But, first, a caveat: I am not a mindreader, nor need I be, since my theory does not concern their motives (which God alone sees) but their philosophy, which the moonbats themselves broadcast and announce to all and sundry. Moonbats might believe that any philosophy whatsoever can lead to any conclusions whatsoever, but I do not. I believe that a philosophy with particular elements present will lead inevitably to particular influences on thought, word, and deed.
Second caveat: It should not be necessary to say, but the degree of power of that influence over an individual on the individual’s devotion to it. Nonetheless, but taken as a mass, over time, the philosophy guiding a crowd actually does indeed guide the crowd in a certain direction, or guide it in a certain way. Whether some straggle more than others, or some outliers break off in a new direction does not change the fact that the crowd as a whole is heading a certain direction for a certain purpose, nor do exceptions to a general rule makes statements about the general rule impossible.
So why this chronophobia, this ferocious hatred of times past? To answer that, we have to remind ourselves what makes a moonbat a moonbat. A moonbat is a person of otherwise normal levels of intelligence and decency who is addicted to a false vision of the world, an attractive vision, a glamour, a dream. The Grand Vision has been sold to them using modern Madison Avenue techniques based on a cynical study of human weaknesses.
The elements of the Grand Vision change from decade to decade. In my father’s time, the Vision involved helping white-skinned male factory hands to unionize and throw off the oppression of capitalists; in my time, the Vision involves helping pregnant lesbian black-skinned atheist women to throw off the oppression of white-skinned male factory hands; in my children’s time, the vision will involve helping the Muslims suppress, oppress, and butcher any lesbian black-skinned atheist women that fall into their hands.
But one element never changes. The Grand Vision is always heaven on earth, a heaven without God, a heaven made by human hands, and the heaven can be achieved if you, the savior, merely forswears the straitjacket of normal morality, and, as an act of holy and noble defiance, indulge in the various vices and crimes to which your crooked nature already inclines you. All you need do is trample the crucifix and kiss the buttocks of the black iron idol of Baphomet, pardon me, I mean all you need do is oppose the oppressive Bourgeoisie morality, bravely throw poop on a few police cars, bravely claim to have favored the Civil Rights Act you and your party opposed, bravely commit adultery, bravery express toleration for sodomy, bravely do exactly what the lemmings around you do, your every hair and whisker sensitive for any hint of change of the mob’s fickle opinion on the issues of the day, to be bravely sure you bravely do exactly what every other lemming does — because you are all nonconformists.
Now, by a Vision, I do not mean a clear and articulate philosophy. I mean a worldview, shared set of assumptions, axioms, conclusion, likes and dislikes, priorities, which most people of any party cannot articulate. Few are the laity able to articulate the theology of their faith: this is as true of political faith as of religious faith. A trivial example will do: those who favor large and paternalistic government and gun control tend to like modern art. These seem disconnected, but under the surface one view of human nature and human destiny is at work.
The moonbats particularly dislike, nay, they hate with a deep and abiding hatred anyone who is articulate, well-educated, thoughtful, rational, and this is for the most amusing and ironic reason imaginable: These degenerate brain-undead cretins think that they are both more moral and more intellectual than honest, normal people. It is central to their self-delusion.
You see, their delusion is a defensive tissue of unreality needed to explain to themselves why they are superior to sane, honest, hard-working, liberty-loving, popular, meaningful, god-fearing and sexually normal and hale human beings. They need something to make their delirium, dishonest, lazy, tyranny-loving, nihilistic, misanthropic, misotheistic and sexually perverted and sick little lives seem not just equal to the norms of the normal, but somehow superior to it.
Obviously, reality can offer no help to this attempt to build self esteem. Real self-esteem is based on real accomplishment, which the Eloi with their soft hands and the Morlocks with their soft brains equally find elusive.
Now, a human being of normal disposition, finding success escaping his fingers, would think logically, analyze the problem, develop a plan, and dive into the honestly hard work needed to make his dream into hard and solid reality. The Morlocks, however, are unskilled at the human arts of thinking, analyzing, planning, working, and very, very unskilled at the art of honesty. So where reality cannot help their self esteem, they turn to unreality.
Reality grants rewards for real accomplishment. Unreality grants everyone a trophy. Everyone is special. Everyone is above average. One hundred percent of people are above the fifty percent median. Everything is awesome!
In unreality, no one keeps score, and there is always one extra chair for playing musical chairs, so no one feels left out. Reality corrects reason because reason is humble. Unreality indulges emotion because unreality is arrogant.
So therefore the Unreality Based community extends this principle of unreality to all aspects of life. Not just money and property, but everything, all forms of dignity and honor whatsoever must be made radically equal.
Delirium is as sane as sanity in their world, and gets the same trophy. Read their academic papers or look at their modern art. The first cannot be distinguished from random phrases generated by a computer, the second cannot be distinguished from paint flung at a canvass by a monkey. Sanity becomes a ‘narrative’, that is, an act of oppression by the sane.
Honesty and dishonesty get the same trophy: since everyone must be true only to his own personal, private truth, of which we all have one. Words are tools used to manipulate others, and have no innate meaning and no innate value. Vulgar words are especially useful, because anything that degrades or degenerates human dignity aids the Morlocks.
Work and sloth get the same trophy, except when the work is extraordinary, and is rewarded by a grateful public with lucre. At this point, the Morlocks turn violent, call the hard work theft and exploitation, and call it any bad names they can, so as to justify their thefts and plunders and murders and dark crimes to each other. The murders are on such a huge scale, expressed in numbers only astronomers comprehend, that new words must be invented to describe them: genocide and democide.
Genocide is the exclusive property and prerogative of the Left. It is an invention of the French Revolution, taken up by the radical National Socialists in Germany as well as the Communist International Socialists in Russia, and then taken to the peak of perfection by Red China under Mao. The Nazis are a Leftwing phenomenon, having nothing in common with a small-government free-market low-taxation pro-gun-ownership republicans.
Liberty and tyranny get the same trophy. They call themselves liberals, but they despise liberty. The Morlocks favor speech codes and thought police.
Popularity and misanthropy get the same trophy. They hate human beings. Look at how they sneer at everything popular, everything beneath the refined yet coke-sniffing noses of the self-appointed elite. See their disdain for ‘flyover’ country. Look at the abortion rate in the inner cities: half the black population never sees the sunlight, just as race-eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger would have liked. The Morlocks in England were caught burning dead babies in the furnaces of hospitals, to heat them, as a way of saving on fuel costs and helping the environment.
God and the Devil get the same trophy, except there is considerable sympathy for the Devil, to whom Saul Alinsky dedicated his book RULES FOR RADICALS, which President Obama follows faithfully. The Devil, I mean, not the book.
“Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where … or which is which), the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”
They equate sexual perversion and sexual health, and some take the equals sign as their emblem.
Now, finally, seeing what a moonbat is, the question becomes, since these people are not stupid and not insane, why is it that they act like they are both?
The answer is that the Grand Vision fails, and the moonbats have to rely on something other than reality to prop it up. They retreat into two opposite delusions, lies they deliberately tell themselves: the first is the idea that the future will vindicate them. No matter what happens in reality, the moonbat can always tell himself that eventually, someday, someday, the Grand Vision will come to pass. Since the Vision is unmoored to reality, IT HAS NO COST.
There is no sacrifice, never any sacrifice, never any downside, never any limitation on what the Grand Vision will cost. It is always a win-win. Conveniently placed amid the clouds of vain imaginations about the ever-receding future, the Vision never need be compared with reality. It is free.
Now, logically, if there were a panacea that cured all ailments, or a good that could serve all purposes, or a tool that could be used for any form of work whatsoever, and if it were also free of cost to obtain, what prevent the utopian panacea from coming into being tomorrow?
Here is where the second deliberate self delusion comes into play: the idea is that some evil conspiracy is hindering the birth of utopia. Since utopia is all good, endlessly good, and has no downside whatsoever, and no cost whatsoever, the only possible motivation of the conspirators is pure sadism combined with a mulish stupid love of the current conditions. The motive is a hatred of everything good and nice, and perhaps also the greed and avarice of whoever is benefiting in the present system at the expense of his neighbors. The motive is unthinking emotional reaction to the coming glory, pathetic fear of the future and love of the past. Hence the name of these evil witches with the magical power to halt the inevitable future: reactionaries.
Do you see how it works?
The reactionary is defined as being motivated by fear of the future, love of ignorance, hardhearted indifference to the sufferings of other, if not sadism, perhaps a greedy desire to defend his unjustly gained privileges.
The revolutionary logically must therefore be defined as being fearless, possessing an intellectual love of learning, a deep sympathy with the suffering of others, and a large-hearted generosity.
Remember, all you need in order to gain all these medals and awards for fearlessness and genius and generosity is trample a crucifix, masturbate in public over kiddie porn, or do some other act, equally abhorrent, in order to show yourself to be free from the chains of Bourgeoisie morality. Those of you who do not wish to give into some dark and perverted desire, all you need do is pen an apologetic for something dark and perverted, such as covering up the genocidal famine orchestrated by Stalin (for which act of monstrous journalistic treason, you will receive a Pulitzer Award.)
Now, if there were any element of the past which was better than the present, even one, or even one element of the present better than the future, then there is a rational reason for opposing the Vision, because then in that one area, that one topic, a man could might maybe possibly have an understandable motive for opposing the Vision. In that case, a fearless and intelligent and magnanimous reactionary would exist: but this is as impossible in Moonbat Theory as a four sided triangle is impossible in Euclid.
At this point, a rational mind would confirm the theory against the evidence, to see if any fearless and intelligent reactionaries exist, or indeed see whether even one element of the past is better than the present, or present than the future. But the whole point of the Grand Vision is that it is immune from evidence. So the same psychological trick which requires the moonbat to embrace a delusion about the past and the future, also requires he embrace a delusion about anything that questions or threatens the delusion.
Since all men not enamored of the Grand Vision are reactionaries by definition, and since all reactionaries are fearful ignoramuses by definition, then all elements of the past whatsoever must be inferior to all elements of the present whatsoever.
The second moonbat told me that the violent crime rate was higher in the 1950s than in decades after. Apparently the second moonbat assumed that the internet over which she was sending me her sneering, ranting, sobbing, screaming letters would not allow me to look up crime statistics, and also assumed I was not old enough to rely on my own memory of the crime rates and race riots in the 1960s and 1970s, or not able to ask my father if he used to lock his door. Perhaps she assumed I never heard of Detroit.
Now then, once confronted with a so called reactionary who does not glamorize the past nor is fearful of the future ( I am a ‘shooking SCIENCE FICTION WRITER ferpetesake!) , whose educational credentials exceed their considerably, both moonbats had to continue to confirm that I believed what their theory said I did, no matter what I said I did. They had to confirm that I was what their theory said I was, not what evidence said I was.
And what was the result? They reacted with fear, as if I were a threat; they both deliberately dumbed down their level of conversation, as if they could not hear my questions nor see any logical contradictions dangled before their eyes; they both accused and accused and accused me with no shred of evidence of any number of shortcomings, malfeasances and crimes; their hearts shriveled up like raisins and prunes.
Remember, the Glorious Vision, which no sane person would believe for a moment, is primarily a method used to excuse and forgive sins by redefining sin as virtue, and virtue as intolerance. The moonbat cannot break free from the Vision any more than a normal man, just using his human powers, can shake off a clinging bad habit, or make himself free of temptation.
So the Glorious Vision promises that, merely by trampling a crucifix, and supporting theft in the name of communism, perversion in the name of marriage equality, murder in the name of historical necessity, blasphemy in the name of personal expression, and child murder in the name of women’s right to choose, all sins will receive the rewards and lauds of sainthood, the palm of martyrdom, the crown of heaven.
You are promised that, free of charge, you will become fearless, and intelligent, and generous and magnanimous.
And then, once you are addicted to sin — for all sin is addictive — you are the slave of the Vision for the same reason a crack whore is a slave to her panderer.
Then the bill comes due. The Vision has robbed you of all the things you were promised. You are now craven, and moronic, a slave in thought and word and deed, and heartless. You have sold your humanity for a mess of pottage.
Now, at this point, a sane person, having seen that everything the Grand Vision promised was a lie, would contemplate whether or not to reject the Cult of the Grand Vision, and look at the evidence fearlessly, with firm intellectual integrity, and weigh and balance the matter logically an carefully, and consult his deeply sensitive human heart.
But all these things are precisely what you lost forever, once you are a moonbat.
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.
