“The same spiritual illness afflicts the left, in that their principle lie is that human beings are mere objects who react in a deterministic way to the environment around them
Spirited: The lie in fact describes the “tellers” of it. In order to believe that one is incapable of resisting depravity in its many forms, one must believe and propagate the lie. Thus the rejection of free will in favor of determinism. The rejection of the two sexes in favor of androgyny. The rejection of the living, personal God in favor of the impersonal, non-lifebearing god of forces.
The problem for such people are people who demonstrate by word and deed that not only is resistance to depravity fully possible but that rising above it-—reaching for that Rock that is higher than I-— is possible as well.
"...Now that I think about it, virtually all forms of mental illness have as a central feature a lack of movement, or a "stuckness" about them (or else a kind of meaningless agitation that goes nowhere). For example, when someone is depressed, it is not just that they are sad -- everyone has their moods -- but that they are in a kind of static, heavy, and occluded state of mind. There is no movement. Or, if there is movement, it's all arbitrary. Nothing is any better or worse than anything else. There is no convergent meaning, as everything goes "flat."
Let's take another example, the pathological narcissist. The narcissist typically develops a "false self" or "as if" personality to negotiate with the outside world. While he will use people to prop up and mirror the false self, in reality, there is no deep exchange with others, i.e., no L (love) or K (knowledge) link.
Rather, the clinical narcissist uses people in order to maintain a kind of static equilibrium, so as to avoid intolerable emotions, in particular, shame. In other words, the narcissist may outwardly appear to have a strong ego, but it is actually quite brittle. The very purpose of his narcissistic defenses (i.e., the false self) is to protect the unthought true self from an emotional catastrophe.
But such a person slowly dies from within, because if one cannot suffer pain, one cannot suffer pleasure. In order to maintain the closed system, __the narcissist also closes himself__ to real love, which causes the soul to wither from within. He eventually dies of his addiction to the false mirroring he craves.
When people hear the term "narcissism," they often think of it in terms of physical attributes, but it can equally apply to the intellect (or to any other positive attribute, for that matter). Academia is full of "brilliant" people whose intelligence has been hijacked in the service of their narcissism, the result being that their minds eventually become closed and therefore no longer susceptible to real organic growth (vs. a kind of mechanical accumulation).
Obama's anti-science advisor, John Holdren, comes readily to mind, but one could think of hundreds of others.
In all forms of enduring psychopathology, portions of the personality can become sealed off, frozen, and autistic, and therefore highly resistant to change -- like giant boulders, or sometimes fine sand, within the soul. Other times it is felt as a kind of icy glacier. The underlying reality is essentially joyless because it does not flow.
Some people who appear to be open are actually tightly closed systems who are merely interacting with their own disavowed projections. One thinks of the mythifolkers who suffered through Bush Derangement Syndrome, and who now constitute the OWSers -- the rabble without a clue -- and their academedia sympathizers.
It's fascinating when you think about it, because these people are under the delusion that they are interacting with the outside world, when it couldn't be more obvious that they are really just trapped in their own absurcular errspace. To withdraw psychic toxins from George Bush and reproject them into "Wall Street" is just a case of new whines in the same battle.
And here is another key point: this state also brings a kind of pseudo-freedom that conceals actual enslavement to the projected object, __from which the projector cannot escape__. It reminds me of the Taoist principle that if you want to control a bull, just give it a large pasture.
In America, "freedom of speech" is precisely that large pasture, in which __people are free to construct their own fences and define their own arbitrary psychospiritual limits__, which then provide the subjective illusion of real freedom. But [we, by our] very nature -- are very quick to identify these intellectual and spiritual fences, which we don't so much trespass as transpass.
For us, a wall is a challenge, not a limit. Build one and we'll just stand on it to see further. "~ Robert W. Godwin, Ph.D - (forensic clinical psychologist)