Motus Mentis

9 Comments

1. Mike D'Virgilio says

   Malcolm, I just read the entropy piece (at AG) and it was spectacular. Getting to the heart of what makes the left so evil, other than Satan, is what I grapple with all the time. I know it has something to do with relativism, their eschewing of God and his created order, for “they will be like God knowing good and evil.” Leftism will always loose because it is spitting into the created wind. Objective reality as it is will always repudiate everything they do eventually, but much damage will come in the wake of their losing. And as we’re seeing now how the left took over liberalism, and what was once ostensibly tolerant has become tyrannical. Get rid of Truth, and the will to power is all you got left, pun intended I guess:) Thanks!

   Posted March 22, 2022 at 10:13 am | Permalink
2. Malcolm says

   Thank you, Mike!

   Posted March 22, 2022 at 11:17 am | Permalink
3. Trace says

   I was so taken by what you’ve written here I had to comment! Excellent insight into the disease that is leftism and written with such brevity and succinctness…wow..Bravo!

   Posted March 22, 2022 at 4:10 pm | Permalink
4. Peter A. Taylor says

   I tried a few years ago to explain “left” and “right” in terms of risk aversion. People on the right set store by their honoring of a moral tradition, giving them an inherent bias in favor of risk aversion. People on the left set store by their moral superiority over tradition, giving them a bias in favor of ill-considered and untested change. A leftist is like a stockbroker and financial advisor who makes money off of commissions, and who thus has an incentive to make a lot of trades in his clients’ portfolios, regardless of whether of not these trades are really in the clients’ best interests.

   I think I prefer Spandrel’s definition, which was something like, “Leftism is whatever sociopaths are trying to get away with this week.”

   I also liked Devin Finbarr’s definition: “Leftism is the process by which intellectuals try to obtain power by being holier-than-thou according to the evolving memeplex tradition arising from Christianity.”

   One problem with defining leftism in terms of motives is that the motives of the leaders are often wildly different from the motives of the followers.

   Posted March 22, 2022 at 7:11 pm | Permalink
5. Malcolm says

   Hi Peter,

   Yes, I wasn’t even trying to get at motivation in this brief post, but rather just to note that the action of the Left always seems to level, flatten, and tend toward decreasing order — from a blooming garden of distinctively different flowers toward an undifferentiated blob of yeast; from a towering hierarchy of complex ranks and relations, with its apex in Heaven, to a faceless mass of myrmidons huddled amongst the rubble of everything they’ve torn down.

   And yes, it’s easy to be careless when you’re placing your bets with someone else’s money. A wiser system of political suffrage would require that those with a voice have some “skin in the game”.

   Posted March 22, 2022 at 8:04 pm | Permalink
6. mharko says

   Someone already into apophthegmata will (or ought to) have already discovered Don Colacho. I find in his apprehension of your thesis a resounding affirmation.

   https://don-colacho.blogspot.com/search?q=order
   a short sampling:
   Hierarchies are heavenly.
   In Hell all are equal. (#1,451)

   In society just as in the soul, when hierarchies abdicate the appetites rule. (#1,719)

   Man emerges from the beast when he orders his instincts hierarchically. (#1,917)
   p.s. Love the title, quoting Tolkien.

   Posted March 22, 2022 at 10:05 pm | Permalink
7. Whitewall says

   Speaking of dysfunction and death, this may be the most dangerous question through November of 2024:
   https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/03/the-freeport-question-of-our-time.php

   Posted March 25, 2022 at 11:24 am | Permalink
8. Jacques says

   That’s fantastic Malcolm. Beautiful.

   On the way to deathly homogeneity, Leftism creates its own counterfeit order. So while the end goal might be the abolition of Man and Woman (for example) the means to that end is a highly complex, nitpicking re-ordering.

   Really it’s not a re-ordering at all because it’s blatantly incoherent and self-defeating. Let’s say it’s a doomed *attempt* at a complex re-ordering. (And no matter how many times it fails on its own terms, they just keep trying — ever more fanatically and psychotically.)

   That seems to be where we are now.

   Leftism doesn’t say that Man and Woman don’t exist. Instead, Leftism tells us with 100% certainty that Man and Woman *do* exist, have always existed and will exist until the end of time — but what these things essentially are has no relation to the traditional or natural order, and their essential natures are rediscovered and redefined from one day to the next.

   The eternal Platonic form of Manhood is a pregnant humanoid, and the eternal Platonic form of Womanhood is a person born with a penis and testicles. But wait! Actually the eternal Platonic form of Manhood is *both* of those things. And also neither!

   At any given moment, there’s always a perfect definition just out of reach; there’s always progress to be made. Someone who thinks women have penises and men give birth is almost there, but not yet fully enlightened. Whatever the eternal Platonic form may be, it must be such that normal people for the entirety of human history were wrong about it. (The Platonic form must exist so that they can be wrong and Leftism can be right.)

   Presumably at some point Leftism will tell us that it’s evil and unscientific to categorize humans as men and women under any definitions — and, eventually, that it’s equally evil and unscientific to categorize lifeforms as human and non-human, mammal and non-mammal… But we haven’t yet “progressed” to that point.

   I guess it’s a bit like the mold on the orange. The mold does have its own internal logic and structure, which can’t be integrated with that of the orange.

   Posted April 5, 2022 at 10:59 am | Permalink
9. Malcolm says

   Jacques! Nice to see you back here.

   It’s all so fatiguing. I’m running out of things to say about these people, and their hallucinations; I wish they’d all just go away, which of course they won’t, any more than cancer does… or entropy. (But then cancer is entropy, after all.)

   Posted April 6, 2022 at 11:48 pm | Permalink