“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down myself. I have the power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it again. this commandment I have received from my Father.”
-John 10:18
The cheerful, immediate relationship of a Sunday afternoon in April, a green lawn, a bubbling river, a white-capped peak, you’d almost never know that the truth was being driven underground.
The strange thing about freedom is that it anesthetizes one from the reality of its creation. All one sees is a plateau of balmy well-being. The poignant need for loyalty and commitment, where truth is hard to obtain and dearly paid for, seems vintage or passé, if not mocked as well. The spiritual condition where real connection with one another can only be glimpsed through the thicket of a world which withholds it from us is medieval or foreign, if not completely unconsidered.
The easy-going nature of contemporary life makes it seem as though nothing was ever seriously intended in the poignant search for truth and communion of our forbearers. Anesthetized to life’s precariousness, we can’t imagine the murderous consequences of joinerism, of how truth is the scaffold of every part of our life, of the consequentiality of a war on our cognitive liberty. Going with the flow because nothing could be the harm in a kind of unconsidered consumption of the merchandise of fiat and diktat ultimately means your vote is defrauded the same as your money.
What is this desire in us to reach out for some ready-made “science” to explain to us questions of a moral nature? What is it about freedom that makes us want to bypass the discovery of the human significance of things? Somehow instead we desire inconsequentiality, the fabricated over the unfabricated, for someone to tell us so we may bypass the obligatory exploration of our own states of mind. A life of fashionable nonsense which refuses to refresh the seminal ardor of the blessings of Liberty is not only a life without beauty, but also a life which quickly dispatches our heirs to a plane of hardships and truthlessness. Bleak, deranged nihilism is the wage for trading joinerism for truth.
A mainstay of the Western tradition is to live without excuses, especially spiritual excuses. There is no intermediary between us and the original source of transcendent beauty. There is no ready-made science. No one is coming to save you, he already came. The individual must be a carriage for truth, and for this cognitive liberty is required. And for this, we must cultivate a discipline and a method to our individualism. Only then can we bring a sense of truthfulness and reality into our relations with one another.
Whether internally in our psyches, or circumstantially in our countries, unconsidered mass-consciousness inevitably erects a secret police which prevents us from trusting one another, and thereby longing for one another nonetheless as distant, spectral representations of the possibility for communion and truth. The intransigent suspicion toward one another quickly develops into an alienation and then a ruthlessness, and the sense that we ever had a freedom to preserve in the first place is lost. This secret police could be a malign introject, a Státní bezpečnost, or a Facebook.
The world has a transcendental significance in things that we humans don’t just create from moment to moment. This is a sensibility as necessary today as it was then. It is easily obscured by the flood of luxuries and merchandise, flitting from relationship to relationship. But the soul is not nourished with transitions, it is nourished through permanent possessions.
And when the soul and the courage of a people has atrophied enough through perpetual, joinerist regression, the agenda of the secret police becomes the agenda of the state at large. The audacity the Cheka could never hope for in times of strength becomes a walk in the park. When shallow joinerism is all that remains and truth tellers are crucified for their material possessions, the joiners cannibalize each other and snuff each other out in a jostling scrum of pettiness and desperation.
The Western revolution was that what is good for one is good for all. Without respect for the beauty-making power of one solitary individual, the well-being of the community cannot be understood. It is the beauty making instinct which reaches out to another across the Ceaucescu-style mass housing block alienation of joinerist ideology with the offer of love and communion and truthfulness.
Ultimately somebody must trust, somebody must create, somebody must bring beauty, somebody must love, somebody must initiate. This joinerism lulls us into complicity that the world be remade through coercion and subversion in order to shirk our nature as initiators. But the last scapegoat came to remind us that there is a transcendent, permanent domain of beauty and truth beyond the fashionable nonsense and the manifesto of the secret police.
Please remember to be loyal to that which transcends.
-RC