Maverick Philosopher

Kierkegaard on the Impotence of Earthly Power

Substack latest.

Is the Left Out for Power Alone?

Tucker Carlson and many other conservatives say that the Left is out for power alone, but it is not true. I grant, of course, that leftists love power and will do anything to gain it and maintain it. But why do they want it? Not for the sake of power alone, but to implement their agenda which they believe will be good for them and their clients. It is for the sake of the agenda -- the things to be done -- that leftists want power.

 

With their hands on the levers of power, the Democrats can keep the borders open, empty the prisons, defund the police except for the state police, confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens, do away with the filibuster, give felons the right to vote while in prison, outlaw home schooling, alter curricula to promote the 'progressive' worldview (by among other things injecting 1619 Project fabrications into said curricula), infiltrate and ultimately destroy the institutions of civil society, pass 'hate speech' laws to squelch dissent, suppress religion, and so on into the abyss of leftist nihilism.

Servility Will Cower to Force

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:

For my part, I am persuaded that in all governments, whatever their nature may be, servility will cower to force, and adulation will follow power. The only means to prevent men from degrading themselves is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the sure method of debasing them. (Quoted in Zbigniew Janowski, Homo Americanus, p. 15)

No man, and no group of men. We need checks and balances all up and down the line.  

And yes the people are ovine and servile and will cower to power. That has been amply demonstrated of late by the masses' mindless donning of useless masks. Don we now our fey apparel! Let us signal our specious virtue and adherence to the party line of Lord Fauci and his minions.  And when the party line shifts, we shift with it!

The other day I espied a lady, driving alone, windows rolled up, wearing a big black mask. But I was in a charitable mood. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe she just left a doctor's office where entrance required the fashion accessory in question, and she forgot to take it off." But then I waxed rather less charitable. "Is she so oblivious to the mechanics of respiration that she would leave that rag around her face when alone?"

As for Dr. Fauci, RFK Jr. has his number. You all should read his The Real Anthony Fauci.  Look it up. Buy it. Study it.  The author's an outlier, a decent Dem, like Tulsi Gabbard.

Beware the Ides of March, Vladimir

"They are come, but not yet gone."

Thus spoke the soothsayer to Julius Caesar when the dictator perpetuus said to the soothsayer that the Ides of March had come and he was still alive.

Dictator perpetuus has an overly confident ring to it much like eintausendjähriges Reich. 

Some history here.

The Death of Caesar (1798) by Vincenzo Camuccini

Truth and Power

'Speaking truth to power' is a phrase leftists love when they are out of power; in power, they exercise it, and truth be damned. They imbibed mendacity with their mothers' milk.

The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition

Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.

Read the rest at Substack.

Linked at my Facebook page. You may leave a comment there if you wish, or send me an e-mail message.  I have come to refer to Facebook as Furzbuch because its suppression of free speech surely stinks to high heaven. 

There I must walk the line. But I won't back down.  It's going to be a long twilight struggle* against the forces of darkness, my friends. (Wo)Man up, gear up, but be of good cheer. Long live the Republic!

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*"Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." JFK Inaugural Speech, 1961.

Of the four, tyranny is greatest threat at the present time, the tyranny of the deep state wokesters who control the Democrat Party and pull the strings of the puppet-in-chief, Joe Biden.

Speaking Truth to Power

When a leftist speaks truth to power, it is not out of respect for truth, but out of respect for the power that he hopes to achieve by using truth-telling as a means to his end. 

Dura lex, sed lex

"The law is hard, but the law is the law." Not to a leftist, however, for whom the law is but an expression of power. Power knows no moral constraint.

Hospitals and Torture Chambers

We are strangely, insanely, conflicted.  We care lovingly, or at least dutifully, for the sick, the injured, and the dying. But we also torture people to death in ways that inspire envy in demons. The belief that humans are inherently good is one of the deepest of human delusions. Paradoxically, those who succumb to it excel in the theory and practice of hell, to borrow a title from Eugen Kogon's unforgettable book.

Limited government and checks and balances across the board help keep power dispersed, the power that goes to the head and makes of the half-way decent moral monsters. Prospects for limited government, however, are themselves  limited in a high-tech surveillance society in which soft totalitarianism can be expected to give way to the good old-fashioned hard variety.

Kierkegaard on the Power and the Powerlessness of Earthly Power

The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:

. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)

My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible.  My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible.  My permitting (forbidding) is justified only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible).  And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible.  Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.

 

For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws and their enforcement.  The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it.  Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.

Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful.  But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty.  The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.  But the overlap will always only be partial.

Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence.  (For example, the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Palestinian cause or its methods.)  See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.

The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable.  Or so I would argue against the anarchists.  But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and often misused.  Communist governments murdered some 100 million during the twentieth century alone. This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.  The Founders of the United States of America understood this. It is an understanding that is approaching its nadir as 2020 fades.

We don't know whether God exists.  But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and coalescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason. 

This coalescence is a mystical unity that cannot be achieved by human effort. The Eschaton cannot be immanentized. If this divine mystical unity exists, it does not exist in the here and now, or in the future of the here and now.  If this unity does not exist, it cannot be for us an ideal.  Only what is realizable by us can serve as an ideal for us.

Kierkegaard the Corrective is an anti-Hegel and an anti-Marx. Hegel held that the unity existed already, here below. Marx, recognizing the professorial bluster for what it was, turned Hegel upon his head, urging that it be brought about. "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.)  But the conception itself was fatally flawed, already in Hegel.

We saw the sequel. It was a road to slavery and the gulag.

Horribile dictu, having learned nothing, we are about to repeat the same mistakes.

There is no heaven on earth and there cannot be. Because there cannot be, heaven on earth cannot without disaster be pursued as an ideal. If there is heaven, it is Elsewhere, beyond the human horizon. 

Believers and unbelievers can live in peace, or at least in the absence of war, if the unbelievers on the Left eschew their totalitarianism, which is a perversion of the dogmatic certainties of the Age of Belief.  But they cannot be reasonably expected to do so. It is  not 'who they are' in their silly way of speaking.

We who love liberty are in for the burden of a long twilight struggle against forces of darkness in the gloaming.

Is the Left Out for Power Alone?

The following is a sample of (some of) what I post at my Facebook page.  I swore off Facebook for July, but I have been back in the groove since 1 August doing my humble bit to beat back the forces of darkness.  They have sicced their censor bots on me, so I have to be careful how I say things lest I get de-platformed.  My obscurity affords me some cover.  Obscurity has its uses and compensations.  The value of fame, on the other hand, may be gauged by the quality of those who confer it.

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Tucker Carlson and many other conservatives say that leftists are out for power alone, but it is not true. I grant, of course, that leftists love power and will do anything to gain it and maintain it. But why do they want it? They want it in order to implement their agenda which they believe will be good for them and their clients. It is for the sake of the agenda -- the things to be done -- that leftists want power.

With their hands on the levers of power, the Democrats can keep the borders open, empty the prisons, defund the police, confiscate firearms, do away with the filibuster, give felons the right to vote while in prison, outlaw home schooling, alter curricula to promote the 'progressive' worldview (by among other things injecting 1619 project fabrications into said curricula), infiltrate and ultimately destroy the institutions of civil society, erase history by the destruction of monuments, remove every vestige of Christinaity from the public square, pass 'hate speech' laws to squelch dissent, and so on into the abyss.