Why The Hostile Elite Hate The Western Canon
Preface
In one way it would be more appropriate to put this essay in the WTF? folder of the Writings section of this website. After all, without even leaving the house all one needs is a computer and a chair to have a front row seat to the total collapse of Western Civilization. A rather unpleasant fact, at least for some, that would inspire a reasonable response, and not just for those who are celebrating the collapse, but for those who aren't.
That response being: The Western Canon? WTF?
But, since I'm taking a slightly different approach to this essay than to the ones in the WTF? folder, it seemed more appropriate for me to put it here.
Anyway, the point is, I want the reader to know that I am well aware of how irrelevant, and even crazy, an interest in the Western canon might seem to many at this time, even those who value it, or are at least sympathetic to those who do, but especially those who don't. But there's a value to, not just swimming against the tide, but better yet, hovering above one's today, whenever that day is. And certainly our today is far crazier than an interest in the great books of the Western canon. So to that subject, I shall now turn.
Introduction
Life is impossible without the sense of value and identity. One only need visit an insane asylum, or a prison, to confirm that one. Or, if not impossible, close enough. Unless one has been living under a rock for the last, who knows how long, but let’s say since the 1960’s, there has been a lot of talk about identity. That much of it has been nonsense is beside the point, or rather, it’s the whole point. Are you with me so far?
“No. Not at all.”
Ok then, let’s start again from the beginning.
Life is impossible without the sense of value and identity. One only need to visit an insane asylum or prison, whether closed, or open, to have this confirmed. A high-ranking, well run, closed asylum, with actual walls and a door, would be something like McLean, or for a prison there’s Alderson.
A open asylum or prison with no walls, doors, or borders, would be, well, what you would expect, something poorly kept and badly run.
Naturally, the best example in the world right now of a poorly kept and badly run open air asylum/prison would be the United States of America.
One reason, though certainly not the only one, would be that there is no unified sense of value and identity, at all, anywhere. That the United States, and not just the United States, truly does qualify as an open air, elastic asylum/prison, stretching from coast to coast, is one of the consequences of this, or the consequence of this. What accounts for this sad state of affairs?
To answer that is a tall order.
In fact, to answer it in detail would turn an article or essay into, not just a book, but a multi-volume work requiring a generous grant and a team of research assistants. But where would the money come from, or the reasearch assistants? The money wouldn’t come from the elite. They’re the ones I’m referring to in the subtitle of this essay. And it’s doubtful one would find a team of research assistants, since they’re either brainwashed (brainsoiled would be a better word at this point) or too scared to take part in such a project, unless they could remain anonymous.
But none of that matters anyway, since even if I had the money and team I
wouldn’t write such a multi-volume work, or probably even a book (though you never know). The reason is because not only am I not an academic, I’m not even an intellectual, whatever that is. But I do have an intellect, we all do, and so I’m here to use it. And the first thing I’ll use it for is to recognize the fact that you can’t reduce anything, let alone something as complex as the Western canon and its many interpretations, to a single causal force.
Needless to say, this is not a detailed analysis of the Western canon. It’s just an essay, an atttempt to direct attention to why I value the Western canon and why the hostile elite doesn’t. But if I’m no scholar, academic, or intellectual, and if this isn’t a detailed analysis of anything, let alone the Western canon, am I qualified to say something about it, or anything?
Of course I am. The meaning of life is your response to it, and we respond to the world around us, especially to what interests us, and the Western canon is not only interesting to me, it’s very important, and intimately connected to my sense of value and identity, and in this essay I’ll say why.
Or, to be more specific, I'll give an answer - for now - as to why.
Besides, it's better that such a defense of the canon as the one I'll offer here does not come from a scholar. Especially the kind one might find milling around university campuses in the West today in general and the United States in particular. They have proven Nietzsche right when he said of them that scholars only appear during an age of civilizational decline.
Today's scholars and academics are merely valets, dutiful employees of the hostile elite, with their pseudo-intellectual, cornball studies of this and that.
They are not competent and committed social critics capable of, or even interested in, continuous learning, change, and growth. Not at all.
They're Yes men (and women), totally lacking in originality, inspiration, and intellectual vitality, and as such are doomed to live out their lives as just some of the representatives of a cultural impoverishment that the hostile elite are imposing by force and on purpose. They are by nature and profession incapable of producing anything lasting, that is to say, anything fruitful, original, and interesting. No positive and enduring change will ever come from them - ever. Such change, if it ever comes at all, will only come from those now operating on the cultural periphery. Put bluntly, when it comes to the elite's deliberate destruction of the West, the scholars and academics are accomplices. Just as the elite are accomplices in the robbery, rape, and murder of the host population of Western nations - all of them - being carried out as we speak by their many proxies (foreign and domestic).
That being the case, and it obviously is, who cares about being called racist or xenophobic by those who have targeted you and yours for destruction?
Leaving that deadly question aside, I’ll also have something to say about the hostile elite's arrogant resentment (masked as contempt, of course) for the Western canon, as well as the unintelligent wrath for the same coming from the elite's useful idiots and paid proxies. Though it should be obvious that why I value the canon - and why the elite, et al. don't - go together.
The great books of the West are attacked by the hostile elite, their paid proxies and useful idiots, not just because they were all written by white men, but because they are valued by white men today, few as we are, and in spite of the fact that we have no institutional power of cultural control.
This essay is just my thoughts on some great books, the hostile elite, and my response to both. So, from one point of view, I’m right where I’m supposed to be, sitting here in my chair, in front of my computer, with my own front row seat to the total collapse of Western Civilization, writing about why I value the great books of the West, or the Western canon, and why the hostile elite, et al. have been attacking it since I can remember.
Or, whether I am right where I’m supposed to be or not, I’m right where I am. And where am I? Well, literally, Argentina, and way down in Argentina, in Patagonia, a good 7,000 miles from where I used to be, which conveniently enough, was where I first came into contact with the Western canon, and the hostile elite, two things that, for good or bad, got me to think long and hard about the sense of value and the word identity.
I
Though I couldn’t have put it this way at the time, the most important consequence of my first real contact with the Western canon was its impact on my sense of value and identity. It still is.
With that initial contact the ground under me shifted, the landscape was altered, and the scenery changed. Happily, I’ve never been the same since.
I was so inspired by, well, all of it, the books, the classes, the teachers, my fellow students, that it felt as if a giant, kind, and loving hand had placed me on top of a mountain. It also felt at times as if I were between the sword and the wall. That I was often and cruelly thrown down from the mountain, that I was also slammed against the wall and stabbed in every possible part of my body by the sword of fact, and in both cases by that same kind and loving hand, was even more inspiring, no matter how painful. Why?
Because I was learning how to be a man, my own man and no one else’s.
I was on my way in my attempt to answer two of the most important questions in the world, What is mankind? and Who am I? It was worth it.
It was worth every second. It still is. You just can’t keep a good man down. Especially one who loves books, great books, and goes in search of a quiet place to read them - far from the chatter of parochial gossip and the noise of modern day politics - turning one’s life into a never-ending adventure in the process, not just to read those books but, more importantly, to live them.
And the best way for me to live books is to learn how to live with and respond to suffering, and to embrace the fucked-upness, and to do both on a consistent basis. And that is exactly what kept me going, especially when I didn’t always feel like it. To be or not to be indeed. I’ve always felt that life rewards you for hanging in there, especially for the way you hang in there. And I have never doubted that great books are one way to do it - for me.
I still do. And not just great books. The great books were proof of my passion for knowledge and fed the belief that I was a good person - not better than anyone else, just better than I was before the books - because I was reading great books. Those books made me want to live. They still do.
And that was the problem. Not for me. It was a problem for the hostile elite who hate me for who I am and for what I love. Their purpose in life is to make a man like me sick. It still is. After all, seen from the point of view of the hostile elite, their paid proxies and useful idiots, could you imagine not just a nation, but an entire civilization, with a critical mass of white men like me, each with a passion for knowledge, and a strong and healthy sense of value and identity, all made possible as a result of their intimate relationship with an extraordinary tradition going back some 3,000 years?
How would such a hostile elite’s success be possible? How would they be free to do what they want to do, what they are doing as we speak, destroy the West by, in part, attacking the canon? Well, they wouldn’t. Because, according to them, the racist, sexist, anti-semitic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic (almost finished), xenophobic, nativist, in short, White Man Bad, would oppress said elite, thereby making their success impossible.
Or so they say, and in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. Because, of course, they do have success. And not just success, but power, lots of it.
In fact, they have complete institutional power and cultural control over all human and natural resources in Western world, and have had for ages.
So much for White Supremacy.
And, to make matters more confusing, they want us to praise their success but ignore their power, because White Man Bad is supposed to have it, according to this inverted world of a fairy tale version of reality. And anyone who does believe in it is most definitely sick. Just look around.
Now, mind you, this is not how I interpret the world. It’s how they do. How do I know that? Because they tell me, they tell everyone, in word and deed. It can be seen in their need to scapegoat, gaslight, and exile, or worse, anyone who notices what they're up to and says something about it.
It's why the hostile elite have to demonize dissent and pathologize opposition. Because if they didn't their bullshit interpretation of the world would be exposed and reduced to rubble faster than they can say Whiteness!
For example, they use their considerable power to get everyone to talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation, and then call whites oppressors and all other groups that now make up Identity Politics, the oppressed.
That is, if everyone doesn’t talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation in a way they approve of. How weary one gets of it all - and of them.
But there’s a solution - great books, that is, the Western canon. This too might sound like a fairytale, and a bit of a non sequitur. And, of course, it's not the only solution. It’s just the one I’m directing attention to in this essay.
And I mean the Western canon before the hostile elite, their useful idiots and paid proxies all got their power hungry, money grubbing, psychopathic hands on it. And now we’re back to why I’m in Patagonia, Argentina.
Because I came here to find a quiet place to read a good book. Or, good books. Though one good book comes to mind. No, not that one, I mean another good book that, as it happens, kicked off all of this talk about identity. But, because it was written by a straight (well, sort of) white man, it was permitted to go out of print. It was also permitted to go out of print because it was so unbelievably good, great, in fact. The book I'm referring to is Beyond The Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century.
Of course, that book deserves its own article, essay, or, well, book. What I can say about it now is that it is the first book that really kicked off the discussion about culture and identity and in a serious, unquestionably brilliant way, and it was the one book that changed my life.
Obviously there have been other books, before and certainly after. But nothing comes even remotely close to this one. The reason isn’t just because Peckham was clearly a genius. The reason is because he used his genius to direct attention to the fact that he was not offering the truth about culture and history, or cultural history as a subject of study. Not at all. He was offering an interpretive instrument, an interpretation of the documents and artifacts of a particular period of cultural history that was having a profound impact on an entire civilization at the time he wrote it, and still is.
And that’s all I’m offering, by the way, an interpretation. It’s all any of us can offer, you, me, and everyone else, including the hostile elite, no matter how arrogantly and pretentiously they claim to own the truth. All any of us can offer is an interpretation, which, of course, is what the Western canon itself is. So, to that, and the interpretation offered in this essay, I shall turn.
II
Since this is an essay and not a book, let alone a multi-volume work, we can simplify a complex subject by focusing on a single word - Interpretation.
If all any of us can offer is an interpretation, it is only fair to ask, what is mine? What is my interpretation of the Western canon? What is the hostile elite’s interpretation? These questions strike to the heart of the matter, which is, the interpretation of the Western canon, or one’s interpretation of the world, and themselves, and ultimately, one’s interpretation of life itself.
In a word - Interpretation. And interpretation is definitely, intimately, connected to one’s sense of value and identity.*
*Again, if one doubts this, no problem, just visit a mental hospital or prison, or pretty much any part of the United States or whatever part of the world the hostile elite now controls, which is pretty much all of the Western world, to have this unpleasant fact confirmed.
Or, again, as I like to say, The meaning of life is your response to it.
Speaking of which…
Starting in the 1920’s, in other words, a full century ago, there have been two tendencies for responding to, or interpreting, the Western canon. The first has been to place the Western canon, and all of Western Civilization, under a single, overriding interpretation, such as a Marxist or Freudian, or both, as in the Frankfurt School, or a single ideological interpretation (called The Truth, as such interpretations always are), like what we have now with Identity Politics, or the whole Woke phenomenon, whose roots are in both Communism and Zionism, and still serve the interests of both.
The other was the suggestion to place the Western canon under the study of Cultural History and place both under the Behavioral Sciences, and all three under a general theory of Human Behavior. Needless to say, that is the tradition I am operating out of. Or, to be more precise, that is the tradition that I am living out of. Put bluntly, it is my life. I think about it and respond to it, and to my own responses, every single day. It’s a way of life.
More, it’s the way of a good life, a life worth living. Why?
Because it requires that I live with as much courage, honesty, and intelligence as I can muster. That is what being a good person means to me.
Not a perfect person. A good person. A good person is, for me, someone with a strong drive toward two things, reality and health. And those are the very things one finds over and over again in these great books. Because the drive toward reality is good for the health, in every sense. Now, that is not to say that health was necessarily the intention of each and every writer included in the canon (pre-Woke), but reality was. That's why those books are sitll relevant and why the hostile elite hates, not just the canon, but its readers.
By the way, intention is something very much worth talking about, especially since the Woke, or Identity Politics, claims to know the intention of the canon itself, its writers and readers, and indeed all white people. An abusrd claim, of course, especially since, though they use the word intention or imply it, they have nothing of significance to say about the word itself.
Be that as it may, and just to be clear, I am not the slightest bit interested in getting anyone else to see me as a good person, and I’m not at all interested in seeing myself as better than anyone else, just better than I was yesterday.
But I can’t do it alone. Great books help, and you need help to read great books, that’s what great teachers are for, and great fellow students, and the people you meet in life whether they read great books or not, because, by being a reflection of, and bridge back to life itself , great books help you see the story in everyone’s eyes when you meet them, and get to know them.
All of this can turn one’s life and all of the world into a protracted teaching-learning institution, a value institution, a governing institution, and an idea institution - even an economic one, since life is impossible without those too. And all of that requires an interpretation, one that is coming at us from all directions. But to stay grounded, you need to simplify things so that you can develop your own response to life. And now we’re back to the two tendencies of interpretation coming from the universities.
What is the difference between the two? Actually, in a word, it’s irreconcialable. As in, irreconcialable differences.
In fact, you could say that getting rid of the canon by demonizing it is what they started with. Or, to put it baldly, by demonizing the race most commmonly associated with the Western canon - white people.
Hence the proxy, or golden child, of the hostile elite, Identity Politics.
They started out with the idea of completely destroying Western Civilization and replacing it, thereby giving a new meaning to We Will Replace You, a phrase which alternatives between a promise, if it’s coming from them, to a conspiracy theory, if it’s not coming from them. Whatever.
It's as if they go out of their way to make it perfectly clear to the rest of the world that we are not dealing with an honest people. And we're not.
The point is, the hostile elite has never been interested in diversity, inclusion, or equity. That’s the carrot on the stick for those who want to believe and follow - and for those who live for revenge - for what amounts to their interpretation of the world that they call The Truth. Of course, once the gullible have gobbled down the carrot they'll get the stick. You can count on that. In fact, they already are, and they thoroughly deserve it.
So, on one side you have dishonest people claiming to own the truth.
On the other side there’s, well, strictly speaking, there’s just me, in as much as I am not claiming to speak for anyone, or any group, just me, a reasonably, or if you prefer, a relatively honest person who, far from claiming to own the truth, knows he’ll never have it, and doesn’t even want it, in as much as he isn’t interested in illusions, only in interpretation which, to repeat, is all any of us can offer, including the Woke, or especially them, since they’re the ones claiming to own the truth - an absurdity.
No. There is no truth. Just us there are no moral facts. There's just us and our interpretations, which, of course, is what the Western canon amounts to - an interpretation - a protracted, multifaceted interpretation. The Western canon is a multi-perspective record of human experience, a diversity of interpretations, making the idea that it lacks diversity an example not so much of historical illiteracy and even stupidity, but of intellectual perversity.
III
Again, I’m not here to discuss the Western canon in detail. Like I said, I’m no intellectual, and certainly not an academic or scholar. I’m just a reader, and I read to live, and live to read, and the core of that reading is books commonly associated with that canon. What Nietzsche once said about music could be said about a lot of things, but especially about great books (including all of his), life without them would be a mistake. That’s why I live with great books, and great music.
And I do promise that I will get to exactly why the hostile elite, their paid proxies, and useful idiots, all live, not to satisfy the drive toward reality and health, but to satisfy the drive toward belief - as truth - by, in part, attacking the West and its people in general, and the Western canon in particular.
Though I’m pretty sure anyone reading this knows why the elite do this, and indeed I’ve already touched on it. But more on that later. For now I’ll say that there is a deeper reason for their hatred than simply White Man Bad.
In fact, one could say that White Man Bad is more the occasion than the cause. And that deeper reason will take us back in time to before the creation of, not just the Western canon, but of Western Civilization itself.
But, again, more on that later. At this point, let’s focus on the two tendencies for responding to the Western canon, and how a knowledge of these tendencies can be relevant and useful for us today.
IV
The two tendencies for responding to the Western canon are the two tendencies of human response to anything. That’s why those two tendencies are discernible in the response to the Western canon, because one can see them as the two primary modes of response to anything today, and they both have a root cause. The only root cause I suggest in all of my writings. In fact, it's not so much a root cause as it is an irreducible surd. And I direct attention to that root cause in my writings because academics invariably neglect it. For the most part they seem to be wholly ignorant of it. The point for now being that the root cause and the deeper reason for the hostile elite's hatred mentioned at the end of section III above are one in the same.
In any event, we don’t see those modes of response because we take our responses for granted. It’s the normal way of responding. We just respond and don’t think about it. That’s why we tend to think that the way we are responding is natural, more genes than culture, if you will. We also take things on faith. Which is why lying is to awful, and so easy. Like the kind of lying the hostile elite routinely engages in to acquire and maintain power.
Be that as it may, in times of crisis we do think about the way we are responding to the world. Or, at least some do. This is especially true during periods of great culture crisis, like now. And an important part of education, especially today*, is to prepare us to respond to crises with at least some insight and foresight as well, otherwise we’ll proceed blindly.
*That such an education is needed is not to say that it is being provided - it isn't.
Since we’re talking about the Western canon, we can locate a great change in the way we respond to the world roughly around 1790 and there are three things we can identify that will help us understand something about the nature of this great change. One in art, one in philosophy, and one in history.
Or, human creativity, human thought, and human action.
In art it was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In philosophy it was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And in history it was the French Revolution.
To simplify a complex matter, I’ll reduce each one to their essentials.
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Werther was a young man who could no longer maintain the enthusiastic sentimentalism of the late Enlightenment that is often used to supress our perception of unpleasant facts that we can’t seem to get around because they won’t go away. The result was an internal chaos that soon became external when he started, as we say today, acting out. It was as if the only way to make his pain real was to share it with the world. But the world around him didn’t understand, ending in his loss of value and identity and ultimate suicide. In short, he entered The Wasteland and couldn’t get out.
But Goethe did. In fact, those who have entered The Wasteland, which is the loss of value and identity, and have either died there or managed to escape and never return to the culture they left - even if they still lived in it - are those we still call The Romantics, and the cultural period of Western history that bears their name is Romanticism. Again, needless to say, it is the tradition I am operating of and have been for over 30 years.
In any event, Goethe, though he came close, did not commit suicide. He was the first artist to pass through the pessimism that follows the abandonment of sentimentality and saw that to say that this is the worst of all possible worlds is no more satisfactory than to say that this is the best, a common thought of Enlightenment sentimentality, still practiced by many.
Or, to be more precise, Geothe was the first artist who left a record of such an experience. One may hazard to guess that many came before, and certainly since, who have left no record. Be that as it may, the point is that for the first time, not just in European history, but in human history, individuals were beginning to see through the pretentions not just of the Enlightenment, but, by extension, any explanation claiming to be perfect and final. Which, up until that time, were all explanations.
This is why Nietzsche’s response to The Wasteland was to say that Joy is deeper than sorrow. If sorrow is the lust for finality (whether that lust is sought for in the comfort of conformity to one’s culture, or in the alienation, isolation and helpless despair of The Wasteland), then Joy is eternal creation of value and identity out of one’s own resources, beyond the surface of personality, and into the depths of one’s being. From this perspective, and speaking of unpleasant facts, it couldn’t be more obvious that few have truly left the ancient world. They still lust for finality. With no group is this truer than with those who pretentiously refer to themselves as progressives.
In the history of the human race there is not a bigger group of more pretentious fakes. Though only useful idiots to the hostile elite, they still constitute a threat to human survival in as much as they serve that elite.
In any event, for our purposes here, the symbolic significance of Werther’s acting out and suicide was the destruction of identity consequent upon the failure of the vision of an ordered and meaningful society, either traditional or sentimental. Meaning, Order, Value, and Idenity were lost, and for the first time the problem of the modern age was revealed. This was the beginning of the greatest cultural redirection since the Paleolithic age.
V
The Critique of Pure Reason
But it is not enough to respond symbolically, or artistically. We also need to conceptualize. And a conceptual response was exactly what Immanuel Kant offered in his great work, The Crituque of Pure Reason, considered by many to be the greatest work of philosophy. Whether it is or not, Kant’s great insight can be reduced to this: order is a characteristic of the mind.
Meaning, that order can not be located in a Divine source (God, Religion, Theology) or in a Natural source (Nature, Politics, Ideology). The source of that order is in the human mind or, to repeat, The meaning of life is your response to it. There’s no question, however, that Kant backpedaled in his next book, The Critique of Practical Reason. That backpedaling has continued ever since. It remains a problem. The only answer to it that I am aware of is Cultural Transcendence. But we're not ready to turn to that yet.
VI
The French Revolution
The third thing we can identify in our attempt to understand the world we now live in is a social and historical event, The French Revolution.
Put simply, but with no more simple-mindedness than was put at the time, or since, the French Revolution attempted to reconcile the World with our Explanation of it. The goal of the elite of that Revolution, and their followers, was to create a society where the World and Explanation are one.
That is, the goal was perfect adaptation.
Of course, the claim that a belief-system can do this is the justification for every revolution. It’s why after every revolution we wind up with more or less the same thing we started out with. The only difference being a changing of the guard. Worse, not only is it the classic rationale for every revolution, it’s the norm, or at least the assumption, of every culture and its belief-system, that the system is synonymous with the truth and reality.
It’s why no authority has ever allowed itself to be criticized - with one important exception that we’ll get to in a moment - because even authority knows in its bones that such a claim is not true, can’t possibily be true, never was, and never will be. Of course, those who don't know, the truly clueless, are by far the most dangerous whenever they get into power.
So then what was the difference with the French Revolution? Historically, philosophically, and psychologically, the difference was this:
The Platonic-Christian tradition said that the disparity between us and the world can only be resolved by an explanation that comes from our leaders, whether it’s an elite, a philosopher-king, or a Pope, but whose source was Divine. The problem here was that, from the point of view of Explanation, it was a rigid hierarchy that did not premit feedback and correction - because its source was Divine - and so produced a devastating incoherence that could not be noticed or commented on, and if it was, that response was met by force, namely, the imposition of the four sanctions exercised by the power center of any culture, primitive, barbaric, or civilized, the sanctions of economic deprivation, imprisonment, torture, and death.
The new empirical-Enlightenment tradition, on the other hand, a tradition that had been developing for a few centuries and that culminated in the French Revolution, recognized this incoherence and responded by ascribing ultimate value to what lies outside of us, whether it is evil and guilty, meaning, The Monarchy, Aristocracy, The Patriarchy, White Supremacy, etc., or whether it is good and innocent; The Poor, The Proletariat, and groups based on Race, Gender, Sexual Orientation, or Identity Politics.
Note: This was the beginning of the Polarization that was to haunt us throughout the 20th century and, unfortunately, is haunting us still. Again, the only solution to Polarization available now is Cultural Transcendence. At this point, it’s our only excuse for hope.
In quieter parts of Cultural History than politics, revolution, and war, can be better seen the real significance of a cultural redirection. So it was in the course of the 18th century, especially in Hume, skepticism re-emerged, a much more powerful skepticism than the ancient variety. The reason it was a much more powerful skepticism was that the issues had become so much clearer, indeed, undeniable. What this new skepticism discovered and demonstrated, irrefutably, was that the judgment that the outside world determintes the inside person was after all a judgment emanating from the inside of that person (or group). This was devastating. Not in itself. It was devastating because the newer belief-system emerged in response to an incoherence in the older. So what?, one might not unreasonably ask.
Well, so, the answer is that the newer belief-system, far from being a solution to the older belief-system, was simply another form of the one it was rebelling against while claiming to be something new! The question is, how can an inversion of a bad idea be an alternative to it? Well, it can't.
That’s why the French Revolution devolved into a Military Dictatorship as soon as its ideas made contact with reality (a reality that doesn’t give a damn what we believe in) just like every other Salvation System before it.
That’s why when this happened anyone could see, who could bare to look, that the Revolutionary Utopianism that justified it all was no more than a secular version of the Christian Heaven that the revolutionaries, many who were atheists, were rebelling against and promising to replace.
Or, as Pete Townshend put it, Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
How progressive. That being the case, is it any surprise that so many progressives identify, proudly - and cluelessly - with primitivism?
In any event, what all of this meant was that the degeneration of the French Revolution into a brutal and bloodly military dictatorship, was not merely a political failure, it was an epistemological failure, a failure of knowledge - at its very core. It was, in short, a failure of Explanation itself.
That is, as mankind had been using Explanation up until then. The result was The Terror and the military dictatorship of Napolean. And what was that? Yet another top-down, rigid hierrarchy that, like the others before it, demanded blind obedience while prohibiting feedback and correction.
In other words, a revolution had released, social, emotional, and moral forces of which the revolutionaries and their followers, had been totally ignorant, and couldn’t control. Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, it ought to.
That is why the failure of the French Revolution - a failure to make good its own claims - marked the beginning of The Age of Explanatory Collapse.
We are still very much living in that age. So we need all the help we can get to understand it and respond appropriately, meaning more adaptively than we seem to be doing now. But along with that we also need to develop the habit of mind and of learning as well. And now we are back, after a long deversion, but as short as I could make it, to why the Western canon is so important to me and to the hostile elite now running, and deliberately ruining, the West. Though “important” for obviously different reasons.
VII
The world is more complex and unpredictable than ever before in human history. But we are also living at a time when we have more precise knowledge about ourselves than ever before. That’s Quantity and Quality of knoweldge. Not just information, but knowledge. We need that knowledge, now more than ever, in order to be able to respond adequately to that complexity and the difficulties and problems that it brings.
Just as we need that habit of mind we acquire when internalizing that knowledge. But, since this is my take on the Western canon, why it’s important to me, and why the hostile elite is and has been attacking it for as long as I can remember, it’s only right that I give my reasons for why it has been so important to me. What exactly I have I gotten out of my encounter with that canon. In short, what can I say about it?
What I can say about it, for now, is this:
The Western canon is the greatest organized source of that knowledge that can be studied, not ideologically, but humanly, historically, behaviorally, and intellectually. It provides us with a knowledge of the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, and the movement of explanation and understanding from myth, to metaphysics to science, from cultures primitive, barbaric, and civilized, or a mix of all three, like the USA. In other words, the canon is a record, the best reocrd, of our knowledge of Explanation and Behavior.
To get rid of that canon, or to keep it only to attack it, distort it, and lie about it, and the demographic most commonly associated with it, white men, and call those attacks, distortions and lies the truth that will Save The World, is to chop the head off of the West and therefore the world, since the world is still adopting the ideas and institutions of the West, and has been for ages, but without being able to adapt to the those ideas and instiutions.
In short, to chop the head off of the West is to put oneself in the position of Alice's Queen of Hearts. Presumably the idea being that the she/he Queen cohabitate with a he/she version of Robespierre and start a new human race.
It's odd, and not a little concerning, that the very people so convinced of their own rightness and righteousness, the very people who now own and control the institutions of the West, are aggressively attacking the very intellectual tradition that made those institutions possible in the first place. Then again, psychotic arrogance and self-awareness don't go together.
In any event, reading these great works gives us a wider frame of reference, habit of mind, self-awareness, and flexibility. The result is continuous growth, and a deeper sense of the diversity of human emotional experience, and an understanding of people as people. The canon also gets us to thinking about the true and the good in our attempts to bend our efforts toward reasonable solutions to our most complex problems and difficulties.
A creative response to all of this can’t but help to strengthen one’s sense of value and identity, to make their life more orderly, less chaotic, and fill it with meaning. All of these things not only help to improve our chances of survival, success and growth in any area of human activity, but it also does much to enhance the quality of life. That’s what the canon has done for me, or rather, that is my response to the Western canon, for now.
But there's more - a lot more. Life without profound gratification, a life limited to the trivial and transitory, is not worth the trouble. It doesn't take long for such a life to become unendurable. It's why insanity, suicide, and wild destruction seem to be the only sensible ways to respond. Another unpleasant fact easily confirmed, again, just look around.
But a sensitive, cultivated and intelligent person can live off of the trivial and transitory for only so long. We truly are living in an Age of Explanatory Collapse. Two responses to that collapse are pertinent to these considerations. The first is a despairing and self-deceiving return to a theological or ideological belief which one has already rejected as inadequate and unsatisfactory. In the other response the individual realizes they must break through into an entirely new way of life.
The problem in that case is: Where should they begin?
Obviously one answer is The Western Canon.
The most important consequence of explanatory collapse is total disorientation, and total disorientation is emotionally - and physiologically - unbearable. The drive toward the sense of value and identity must have gratification, for that drive is itself a consequence of biological adaptation and is built into the human brain and nervous system. This is why that drive has always existed in all cultures at all times. It's literally our common bond.
This is really why the hostile elite hate and attack the Western canon. This is why the hostile elite is insane and evil. Because it attacks the value and identity of those of us who value and identify with the Western canon.
VIII
Again, we are living in at a time when we have more precise knowledge about ourselves than ever before. With that knowledge we can better recognize and understand the value, defecienies, and even the ironic similarities of the two modes of response named above, the ancient and Enlightenment, and how they, though at one time useful and even historically necessary, have both simply outlived their usefulness, and how the only adequate response available to us, at least at this stage in human development, and perhaps far into the future, is Cultural Transcendence.
The incoherence of the ancient way of thinking, let’s call it the traditional view, was not the result of the fact that it’s explanation of the world and corresponding social structure was hierarchical, or because it was a Patriarchy. No. It was because it was a rigid hierarchy that did not permit feedback and correction. It was all top-down. A quick look at any Matriarchy will reveal the same top-down heriarchical rigidity.
The progressive’s perception of incoherence was right. And there's no question that their perception was an important advance. Unfortunately, their response to that perception was wrong - very wrong - and made worse by the fact that they can’t or won’t admit to it. The fact is, the judgement of incoherence by the progressive view was superficial and confusing, which is why it has caused us all so much trouble and why, for all one’s initial sympathies with its believers, they have become so repellent and obnoxious.
From this perspective, the traditional and progressive worldviews are two sides of the same Dogma. The alternative is what I like to refer to as Pragma.
What’s the difference between Dogma and Pragma? Pragma is willing to expose its ideas to a process of continuous feedback and correction for the purpose of continuous learning, change, and growth, and Dogma isn’t - ever.
IX
Obviously, from this perspective, the hostile elite is clearly on the side of Dogma. In fact, given that we are living at a time when we have the most precise knowledge of ourselves then ever before, and given that we need that knowledge, since life is more complex and unpredictable then ever, and given that the hostile elite is clearly on the side of Dogma, it couldn't be more obvious that the hostile elite is a maladaptive force.
The one thing that could help us out of our current dilemma, one that is sure to last well into the future, is an improvment in our drive toward reality and health. An improvement greatly aided by a commitment to great books, or, the Western canon. This might sound like a non sequitur or even an insane ambition* for the simple reason that there is little to no chance of the hostile elite reversing its take on the West in general and the canon in particular, at least not any time soon, and possibly forever. A point to which I would heartily agree. So then, given that I feel that way, why bother to sing the praises of the Western canon, and even devote my life to it?
Because the canon is everything I've said it is, and more. And now we're back to the one exception mentioned in part VI to no authority allowing itself to be criticized. Because the common thread tying the Western canon together is self-criticism without anxiety. That's why the West has been the only civilization in history whose authority has allowed itself to be criticized. Everyone other culture is aligned against it in that regard.
Let that sink in. When you do it won't take long to see that the human race is in no position to laugh at the dinosaurs for getting themselves extinct.
After all, the dinosaurs lasted a lot longer than we have so far.
The other reason why I have devoted my life to the Western canon is because any individual with at least a reasonable amount of courage, honesty, and intelligence is always attracted to what is difficult.
The willingness to engage in self-criticism, the attraction to what is difficult, and the discipline required for both, is what is meant by the word Freedom.
And freedom is, above all else, what the Western canon symbolizes to me - The Drive Toward Freedom, and freedom is only possible when there is choice, the freedom to choose, and to act on our choices is the only way to experience the sense of value and identity in any profound and meaningful way. This is why the hostile elite really hate the West and the canon.
But, that the hostile elite hates the West and the canon, and that the hostile elite have all of the institutional power and cultural control, for now, and are using that power to destroy the canon and the demographic most commonly associated with it, doesn't change a thing in that regard, any more than a person solves a problem by committting murder, or suicide.
In fact, just the opposite. Anymore than a parent who hates a child can diminish the value of that child. Now, it is true that the parent can diminish and even destroy the child's sense of value and identity, but that the child is still precious and valuable and should identify himself as such is a given.
That's why parental abuse is so awful and lasts a lifetime, even if the child is able as an adult to get into some kind of recovery and stay there. Nor is this analogy inapt, since the hostile elite has, in effect, put itself in the role of the Shaming Parent and has made whites its Designated Scapegoat.
Speaking of which, I was in the role of Family Scapegoat for decades, before I became a Family Scapegoat Survivor. But that role was by no means limited to the family. On the contrary. I didn't only get it as a son, brother, cousin, brother-in-law, friend, and neighbor. I got it for being straight, for being white, for being male, and for being an American. The only one that really hurt, that really did major damage to my sense of identity and value as a human being, was as the family scapegoat. That was the one that took a lifetime to recover from. But, because I got it from every other angle as well, I can say without any hesitation now that people go mad in mobs, and are only restored to sanity and health as individuals.
X
In that case, the best thing the scapegoat can do is go No Contact. No doubt easier said than done, in any case, but especially in this one, since the hostile have converted the entire Western world into a Super Tyranny. A Super Tyranny, moreover, that is entirely Scapegoat-Dependent. And a more tenuous hold on power than Scapegoating would be hard to imainge.
As I've said before, but will say again, because it's worth repeating, the hostile elite and their Super Tyranny will fail. Of course, they will take down as many people as possible before all is said and done, even more than they already have, and that is saying plenty. Why the hostile elite will fail can be put simply. Their Super Tyranny aggressively prohibits any and all feedback and correction - the two-fold source of human adaptability.
And now we're back to the deeper reason and the root cause mentioned at the end of section III and beginning of section IV respectively. The deeper reason for the hostile elite's hatred is that they are really at war with Reality.
That's why White Man Bad is merely the occasion and not the root cause. And the root cause is the brain's primary attribute - randomness of response.
This attribute requires the human organism to create a society based on dynamic stability, something those on the side of Dogma can not do. Their need to impose an authoritarian social order that is above criticism and sustained by force is really them recoiling before that requirement. That's why they attack the West in general and the Western canon in particular.
It's also why, as I said earlier, that the deeper reason will take us back in time before the creation of Western Civilization. Because, let's face it, the primary attribute of the human brain is as far back as one can go. It is the genetic basis for which culture is the answer. From that perspective Western Civilization could not be more impressive as civilizations go.
In fact, and to put it as baldly as I can, it is why it is, or was, the greatest civilization in human history. If you insist on tearing it down, during a time when life is more complex and unpredctiable than ever before in human history, you better have something solid as a rock to put in its place. Because an authoritarian regime is no substitute. On the contrary. It is merely proof of the hostile elite's inability to replace it with anything better, and symptomatic of the very problem it refuses to face, let alone solve.
Concluding Remarks
The question now becomes this: How to keep the spirit of freedom alive so that we may find ourselves still standing when the tyranny falls?
Of course, there are many ways to answer that question and each person will ultimately have to answer it for themselves. In this essay I've given a bit of an answer for myself, however indirectly and unsatisfactorily.
I don't like to give advice, prefering instead to share my experience and let it go at that. But I have been asked over the years, and more so recently, a fact that explains why I was inspired to sit down and write this essay.
So, what I can share in closing is this. Since they want to cut off our heads figuratively, at least for now, by cutting us off from the Western canon, one way to keep the spirit alive would be to read into the canon itself. Not the whole thing. Who has time for that? That's certainly not what I've done. But one can read some of it. Enough to get an idea of what it has to offer.
To do that one could read a few books from each period, the Greeks, Romans, The Middle Ages, The Enlightenment, Romanticism and that's it. Enough to get an idea. Enough to get some historical perspective that one could then use to enlarge their contemporary perspective. That way one has a wider frame of reference. What would be the value of doing that?
Well, I've already said something about what the Western canon has done for me, or, to be more precise, what my response to it has been. No small thing since, once again, The meaning of life truly is your response to it.
And it really is. That's not some cutesy, wutsey catch phrase. It's true and the foundation of all of my work and for my life as a self-responsible adult. In that regard the Western canon has helped me to shape a meaningful life.
But there's another more practical reason. We are drowning in a sea of information and, unfortunately, propaganda, lots and lots of propaganda.
A kind of Gresham's cultural law has taken over: information and opinion, not to mention mobs and their agendas, have driven out knowledge, thought, and a collective of individuals with intelligent alternatives to the mass madness that abounds. Put bluntly, today's question is one of freedom versus tyranny. The challenge for those of us who prefer freedom is to cut away this fatty deposit of a sick culture that surrounds the vital nerve of life itself and restore ourselves to sanity and health by recovering our sense of value and identity. Who knows? Maybe for the first time.
To perform this delicate operation each of us must have our own instrument, as it were, an interpretive instrument, one that speaks to us and possibly, over time, to others as well. But, it will be remembered, no matter how well that instrument works, no matter how fond of it we are, and no matter how many people we get to agree with us, in the end it is only an interpretation, an instrument that we use to interpret the world in a way that is satisfactory to us, for now, and an interpretation is all that I have attempted to offer here.
Many years ago, lost and alone, the desire to create such an interpretive instrument became the purpose of my life. Somehow or other, without quite realizing why, I became convinced that this creative act would help me recover what was lost in childhood, my sense of value and identity.
Not an interpretation that I could believe in, or convince myself and others was right. But an interpretation that I could test and use. And for that testing the Western canon offered me incalcuable and infinite riches. It still does.
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