Note Sunday, November 17, 2024: We have edited the below for clarity. We will have to read it again and then write a response essay. Also there’s some links that need to be added. But right now let’s do a review of our philosophy as it has evolved from the 1990s to the 2020s. I’m sure that will be of great interest to our large and growing audience. I am sure that our audience fills coliseum after coliseum and puts Donald Trump’s rallies to shame. I am sure of this.
Note Thursday, November 14, 2024: Okay, we read it. We’ll edit it for clarity and star anything that we feel requires further reflection. And then we’ll do a second over-looping meditation. And that’ll be this awesome “Knight of Faith” essay we’re here performing.
Note Monday, November 11, 2024: This essay is like 25 pages. It is very much an essai in Montaigne’s sense of an attempt to gain insight by following a train of thought where it leads. We’ll publish it now and read it on a telephone. And then maybe change it. Or something.
Trump won, now what? by David Frum for The Atlantic Monthly on Wednesday, November 6, 2024. We share his concerns and are sympathetic with his conclusion:
Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity —- or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.
We will now go into the metaphysics of the matter.
The United States of America has made an evil choice.
We have had four years to come to a consensus on Donald Trump’s actions as president and his behavior afterwards, and if there is a consensus, it is that we’re fine with him using political power to enrich himself and attempting to intimidate and punish dissent, trying to steal the election and then using lies about a stolen election as a campaign platform, promising to use the military to silence protestors and the DOJ to punish political rivals and dissidents, fomenting hateful and often violent rhetoric against immigrants and political opponents, lying as a matter of principle and declaring war on those news organizations that stick to the facts rather than mollycoddle his boring, nihilistic reality-is-my-say-so might-makes-right and us-versus-them politics, and et cetera — all while successfully silencing and sidelining those voices in the GOP who had, in his first four years, pushed back on these, his worst, impulses.
We have handed this Donald Trump and this GOP the keys to the kingdom. We have watched him sin against a form of government that allows us to stand up for honesty, accuracy, clarity, fair play, good will, and competency in government without fearing persecution; and we have watched him corrupt the GOP to the point where nodding along with his autocrat-styled lie of a stolen 2024 election is a requirement for having a voice in the party. And then we gave him and his tag-alongs power over our government. That was not Okay. That was evil.
What we have done is sin against God, ourselves, and everyone else.
We know we have done something evil because we can easily step back ten years and imagine all that Donald has done and said and how he’s changed his political party, and then ask ourselves — our selves of ten years ago — if it would be Okay to grant such impulses further political power. We would say No, that a free people should never bow to this kind of dishonest, cruel, stupid nonsense.
You can argue that we can’t blame Russians for letting Russia turn into an oppressive kleptocracy, and that likewise we can’t blame the us the US for electing Donald Trump in 2024. The decision came within the context of the vagaries of a particular social, media, and political landscape. And how can we blame us for what appears to be infinitely beyond us as individuals? Surely we are all not to blame as individuals and therefore we cannot blame us as an aggregate — which is really just a bunch of individuals fumbling around together, bumping into each other, and otherwise still remaining individuals while getting wine and sometimes bodily fluids on each other’s party suits and dresses. That is true; it is also false. It is true as a rough brush stroke. It is false in the marrows. To the extent it is false, everyone alive, who has ever lived, and maybe even who ever will live also has some share of the blame for this collective evil.
From the perspective of eternity, all things flow together. And so every good and every evil are shared by all; but clearly specific goods and evils are concentrated more in some spots than others: Donald Trump’s corruption of himself and key members of his GOP like Mike Johnson and JD Vance contain more of this specific evil than some John Q. Voter who just couldn’t be bothered to choose reasonably-plausible accounts and clear-eyed-assessments over conspiracy theories and gripes; JQV in turn probably overflows with more of this specific evil than someone who spent years carefully documenting and sharing the dangers of Donald Trump’s administration (here we don’t mean to mean ourselves, since writing essays to oneself and complaining to one’s immediates about clouds of political evil do not seem nearly as worthy as the kind of disciplined public work of someone like Lawrence Lessig, David French, or Liz Cheney; indeed, we feel that we are arguably more guilty than JQV, but more on this later)*; and the members of some tribe that lived three thousand years ago on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean probably have way less share of this particular evil than people living in the USA today. But still, everyone and every turning towards or away from Pure Love flows together, and so we are all truly in this together, and we are all coated with everything ever said or done in this world and perhaps beyond I don’t know the metaphysics is getting hazier and hazier as we metaphysicians drifts out of this solar system like so much space dust.
*[On the second loop let us try a little harder to understand our open disdain for half of the nation, and how that contempt relates to our youthful haughtiness (I can still see me there, leaving the urinals, heading out through the absurd glare of grammar school bathroom tiles, second grade in a new school, hearing some big oaf tell his big oaf ally that he doesn’t know why, but “he just doesn’t like me”; and I think the “he” in question is me; and I feel, as a straighten up with my little shoulders back and my little chin high: That’s right! I don’t like you! You are bad! But why was he bad? Because he acted up in class? Didn’t do his homework? Got poor notes? He was another of these lazy idiots; how could I but disapprove?) does or doesn’t particularly implicate is in their pouty and moronic decision-making.]
From the perspective of eternity, Pure Love explodes through, swamps, and ultimately overruns this flowing-together of everything. And so from the perspective of eternity, we are all One and it is only our more illusionary aspects that behave with either more good (i.e. more turning-towards the Love that creates, shines through, and sustains this great flowing-as-one of the perspectives/illusions/daydreamings) or more evil (i.e. more turning-away from that Love to worship our own ideas and feelings).
We mortal wights cannot look into anyone’s soul, not even our own. We cannot say how evil Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Mike Johnson, JD Vance, your author, or you are. But we can say that it was not Okay for Donald Trump to, for example, attempt to pressure people like Georgia’s Secretary of State and his own VP to cheat and help him overturn the 2020 election, or to double-down on the lie that that election was stolen from him; and it was not okay for Mike Johnson to use a specious ex post facto constitutional argument to provide cover for that lie and to champion the man fomenting that lie; and it wasn’t okay for the leadership of Fox News to choose viewership numbers over honest reporting about that lie and the man fomenting it; and it wasn’t okay for JD Vance to champion the liar and to say he would’ve gone along with the extra-constitutional scheme of refusing to certify Biden’s electors; and it was not okay for John Q. Trumper to bury his discernment in delusion; nor was it okay for John Q. Okay-Sure-Trump-Whatever to not spend the little time and effort required to notice that Donald Trump’s project was an evil one. We can say that all those actions were evil and that they played non-trivial roles in bringing about our present collective evil.
We can say these actions were evil because they are obvious and willful attacks the foundations of our liberal representative government, and this form of government is a spiritual good. It is a spiritual good because we are protected from retaliation when we stand up for honesty, accuracy, fair play, decency, and faithful and competent stewardship in government. In Putin’s Russia today, not only does speaking out against Putin land Russians living in Russia in trouble; Putin is also actively hunting down ex patriots who step out of line*; in such an upside-down moral landscape, collaborating with public evil is rewarded and resisting it is punished. Willfully forcing people into such a hopeless moral dilemma — EITHER protect yourself and your family OR stand up for public virtue — is clearly evil. Therefore willfully attacking or willfully collaborating with attacks on the foundations of liberal representative democracy is evil. And how can liberal representative democracy survive if one side decides it is no longer interested in demanding that elected officials step down after losing office, or that elected officials stay within the bounds of checks and balances on their powers and do not use the power of government to enrich themselves personally and to punish political opponents and silence dissent?
*[Please link to article]
Donald Trump’s actions and rhetoric seem to be those of an abuser/corrupter getting everyone used to abuse and corruption and ready for more abuse and more corruption — always carefully reminding us all that the best little boys and girls worship the one taking away their agency, and the worst little boys and girls get slapped into place. And in the public sphere, being unable to read the souls of our leaders or our fellow citizens, we must decide based on appearances — choosing reasonably-plausible accounts over wild conspiracy theories and/or leaps of faith into mere humans and their merely human promises.
Anyway, just rewind yourself ten years, be a little bit honest, and you will know more clearly than I can argue it: Giving power to this Donald Trump and this GOP is an evil thing to do. We can’t quite put it all together as fully as you can if you just step back in time to the era before Donald Trump managed to shift our national standards. That’s what abusers/corrupters do: They keep changing your base point until you think serving them and their crimes is life, is reality, is how things are, is somehow or other “Okay”.
Of course we shouldn’t leave out the terrible liberal elites who brought this upon themselves by looking down on those poor uneducated suckers who can’t tell the difference between fake news and honest, careful, principled journalism and who can’t figure out that if a man sounds acts and smells like an autocrat well then you probably shouldn’t put him in charge of the government.
Okay, sure, those Fox-News-cut-out-enemies-that-you-put-on-our-dart-board could’ve done a better job. But at the end of the day, you are the one that punched “Donald Trump”. Nobody made you do it.
An irony here is that for forty years both democrats and republicans have embraced neoliberal policies that created a wealth gap equal to the one directly before the Civil War and the Great Depression, and that has also allowed corporations to gain too much power — especially Big Tech, which — if it goes rogue — probably has the information and the power over the search to steer the economy and society as it sees fit. And Biden was starting to push back on neoliberalism; another four years of his policies and we might’ve reined in Big Tech in time to collectively have some leverage over whatever AI is going to be.
But no! That was all too subtle and sensible for you to notice! Those niceties didn’t even register on your faces which catch potato chip crumbs while dreaming into some totally bingeworthy series. Yes, I still disdain you! After all these years. And with my own tongue a little red from wine, and my own oeuvre drifting out beyond the breakers as her seasoned captain drowns his organic whole wheat pasta (cooled because that makes the starch more resistant, which improves fasting glucose and gut health, and helps the body create important lipids) in olive oil and rewatches Ben Stiller’s Starksy tango with Owen Wilson’s Hutch while Snoop Dogg lays it out so they can play it out.*
*[Okay, so, again, in part two; we’ll need to try to loop through this little inner/outer/a-seven-year-olds’-eyes-flash-scorn-violence, and also consider the limits of discipline and the cult of discipline.]
Who failed who here? I don’t know how it all fits together, but traditional conservative judgement-making has always maintained that you should blame the person who pulled the trigger, not the teacher who — through weaknesses of her own and weaknesses of the system she found herself within — didn’t manage to instill enough civic virtue in the shooter.
You know what else? If one party openly abandons their commitment to abiding by election results, it puts the other party in a democratic republic in an extremely difficult position. And to then turn around and act like the party who didn’t quite know what to do with the other party’s abandonment of the foundation of their shared system for keeping everyone out of tyranny’s reach — to act like the party that was still trying to do democracy is to blame because they didn’t figure out a good enough response to this dilemma: That shit’s just crazy. Yeah, they could’ve done a better job; but they didn’t put the gun into the shooter’s hands and they didn’t pull the trigger. And the responsible thing to do is to admit who did what. And go from there.
What about your author? What share of this evil is his? Wasn’t he mostly just screwing around while his nation played with fire? And didn’t he choose to mostly just look askance at and distance himself from Trump supporters and even Trump non-haters? Is he, having been given the gift of insight into this obvious evil, not perhaps more guilty than, say, John Q. Sure-Whatever Trump voter? After all, to whom some specific insight is given, some meaningful related reaction is expected.
It is hard to measure concentrations of evil and guilt, even in specific cases such as the election of Donald Trump in 2024. And the exact metaphysical threads are impossible to trace: Consider, for example, that our stated principle assumes that someone who lived in the ice age and who clearly had absolutely nothing to do with this moment, is also to some (we imagine ever-so-slight) degree guilty of this moment (and all other moments that ever were, are, or shall be). Suffice it to say, from the point of view of eternity, we are all implicated, but to different degrees. And, further, from the point of view of eternity, we are all overrun/swamped by and ultimately one with the Love that is All; and so we are all ultimately forgiven, which is to say: decoupled from everything except the Love we embody in our lives here and there as we all do, but which the wisest among us do more consistently.
From the point of view of finite creatures that span the finite and the infinite, we should work every moment to become wiser:
Every moment we work to stand up straight within ourselves, bending neither to delusions of “there-is-no-Truth” nor to delusions of “I-am-Truth”*. Every moment we push out from within and let the Love explode through our every conscious moment; and then we attempt to move gently and clearly enough so as not to lose sight of the Love that chooses everyone and that swamps and overruns and claims and rejoicingly salvationates everyone always without end amen. And then in the next moment we start over from zero again; and repeat and repeat; and over and over again always we observe and critique and tweak ourselves and try again to live in and through and for the Love that is All.
*[We all slide into both of these errors (“there is no Truth” and “I am Truth”) all the time, whatever our stated philosophies: how often do we slide into the comfy armchair of a sense of material-, relationship-, emotion- and/or intellect-based security [!yes it feels like salvation!]; or into the invigorating spell of exulting (albeit somewhat desperately clawingly) in our own ideas and feelings as if they were the Absolute Truth? And what is Donald Trump’s approach to human interaction but the classic demagoguery of alternating between the nihilism of a all-reality=politics/a-meaningless-tool-for-getting-and-maintaining-power and the blasphemy of “Don’t think for yourselves; just clap for me and my great sway!”???? Hmmm? I ask you, my sleep-walking friends.]
We know that what we have here wrought is evil — regardless of the outcome. Because it is a great evil to reward seriously evil behavior with great power. And that is what we have all here done just now. How bad it will actually be is anybody’s guess. But there were more than enough clues for us to see that Donald Trump’s project has been and will likely continue to be an evil one. And so the good thing to do would’ve been for us to tell Donald Trump to sit politics out. And we didn’t do that.
So: This vote was a mistake. Call it, “evil”, if you will. We all share some blame, even a hunter and gatherer who lived and died on the plains of Europe or Asia or Africa twenty thousand years ago*. And there is no exact accounting for blame, but people like Donald Trump and Mike Johnson do seem to have a higher concentration of this evil within their life-paths as people like that hunter and gatherer, or even like Liz Cheney God bless her for tryin’
*[What about a Saint? Like say for example, Julien of Norwich? If she in her lifetime turned the tide on the inner battle between the gimmes and the Love so that the Love swamped and kept on swamping the gimmes while she was yet living, then isn’t she entering more Good than not-so-Good in this world? And so how can she share the blame for something that’s not-so-Good? This needs to be considered in our second run.]
So how to live in a world like this at a time and place like this? I am speaking to my fellow Americans.
Wait a minute!
First we need to discuss blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
Namely, who is guilty of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?
Us your courageous selfless worldhistoric authors?
Or that self-deluding gopher-boy for the Evil, Mike Johnson?
We are argue that we are not at all blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, but that Michael Johnson totally totally is.
What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?
And why did Jesus say it was the only unforgivable sin?
First, let’s take the pertinent Bible passages right out Wikipedia (They call me “Rock n Roll” ’cause I get ‘er done!)
Matthew 12:30–32: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” [This is from pretty much the same story as in Mark (see below).]
Mark 3:28–30: “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin —- for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”” [they were the “teachers of the law”, who had said that Jesus was driving out unclean spirits “by the prince of demons”; after that spiritual put-down, Jesus goes into this big tirade about how a house divided against itself cannot stand, so how can Satan be undoing Satan’s work?]
Luke 12:8–10: “And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God. And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” [This does not seem to be the same story as recorded in Matthew and Mark; but here again Jesus is ragging on the Pharisees and teachers of the law.]
Hebrews 6:4–6: “For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt.”
Hebrews 10:26–31: “For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy “on the testimony of two or three witnesses.” How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by those who have spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know the one who said, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
1 John 5:16: “If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it.”
[Wikipedia referenced the Oremus Bible Browser for these passages; specifically the New Revised Standard Bible]
First of all, we can for our purposes here, toss out Hebrews and John, since Hebrews is Paul’s notions and the author of John slipped lots of his own notions into the storylines. That leaves us with Matthew, Mark and Luke. In these tellings, we find Jesus Christ annoyed with the Pharisees and other religious authorities, and we see him going so far as to hint — at least in the Matthew/Mark story — that by claiming that Jesus’s actions are the fruits not of Good but of Evil they are blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, which sin he then outright declares “unforgivable”.
Okay, so we all have our moments of pique; and aren’t the rest of us lucky that no one is going around remembering everything we say and then telling stories about what we said for like thirty plus years before writing it down into books that will in a couple hundred years be declared holy, eternal, and infinitely valid scriptural authority? But — setting aside whether or not it is possible to sin against the Love that is All when you are but an illusion woven into the larger illusion through which this Love = All bursts overruns and otherwise exceeds and supersedes — it seems that when religious authorities told people that Jesus was an agent of Satan, rather than of God, Jesus felt that that characterization was so unfair and so completely turned Truth on Its head, that he wanted to be like: “Hey! This right here! This is what it is to sin against the Holy Spirit! And that is not Okay! It is one thing to badmouth me, but by saying that my power comes from Pure Evil, you are doing more than badmouthing me! You are seeing with your own eyes and feeling in your own souls how Love shines through me and my actions; but rather than acknowledge spiritual Love when you witness It — or at least not denigrating It –, you are lying to yourself and everyone else about It: You are lying about what you yourselves sense more fully and clearly than you can sense all your arguments for and against this or that or anything!”
Anyway, that’s our guess as to what’s going on here.
What’s the Holy Spirit, again?
Borrowing Biblical passages again from Wikipedia’s authoritative selectioning (we’ll let the Biblical scholars hash out the very best scriptural references in that daydreamy/hazy-gauzy future in which anyone pays any attention to anything we do):
Mark 13:11 specifically refers to the power of the Holy Spirit to act and speak through the disciples of Jesus in time of need: “Be not anxious beforehand what ye shall speak: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye; for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 10:20 refers to the same act of speaking through the disciples, but uses the term “Spirit of your Father”.
So Jesus seems to equate the Holy Spirit with prophecy, with divine insight. So we’re thinking that Jesus is thinking that we all have enough Godlight within us to recognize the Holy Spirit when It shines through holy feelings ideas words and deeds; and when we either pretend to not witness that Holiness when we do witness It, or when we pretend to witness It when we don’t: in either of those cases we are willfully turning from the Light within and shining through everything, and are therefore willfully courting spiritual blindness.
So we are faced with a spiritual and theological and moral dilemma when we stand next to someone who claims that Donald Trump’s mission is a Holy one, or at least that serving Donald Trump’s quest for power is somehow serving Holiness.
Clearly from our perspective, they are blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. And yet, they seem absolutely certain that they are the ones who are facing the Godlight, while we are the ones turning from fleeing from hiding-in-our-shameful-self-indulgent-ways from Godlight!!
Imagine that!
It boggles the mind, robs the chest of breath, turns the stomach sour, and pushes one right out the spaceship capsule into the void where one spins untethered from the mothership drifting farther and farther away from everything that one had thought one could rely upon in this human life with other humans who we know are essentially the same as we are and so how is it that they can be so certain of their own goodness when we are so certain that they are doing something so clearly and decisively evil????
Hmmmm*
*[Looks like we’ve not really put to bed the question of who is blaspheming, and who is standing up against the blasphemers. In fact, we’ve not even conclusively demonstrated that blaspheming is happening in people’s statements about and actions vis-a-vis Donald Trump’s political activities. Perhaps we should revisit this topic in our follow-up essay.]
I am afraid of what comes next. Will Donald Trump install an effective kleptocracy and maintain power by silencing dissent? Will the USA become another spirit-squelcher like Putin’s Russia where standing up for honesty, accuracy, decency, fair play, faithful stewardship, and competency gets you slandered, bankrupted, imprisoned, and/or killed?? Or will it not get quite so bad? How bad will it get? And who is sinning against God and man? Those who would undermine liberal representative democracy to force their interpretation of the “true religion” on everyone else? Or those like us who believe that liberal representative democracy is the best way to protect everyone’s right to follow a meaningful spiritual path while remaining active in public life?
We maintain that combining spiritual and political authority invariably corrupts both religion and politics — that it tempts everyone to lie to themselves and everyone else about the most sacred matters, and that this encourages people to turn both individually and collectively away from spiritual Love and the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing) that help human feeling/thinking/acting to more meaningfully interact with and interpret* spiritual Love into human life. Anyway, how meaningful can a forced spiritual path be to anyone? That’s the joy of liberal representative democracies: The joy of a free people each relating to Godlight as individuals in ways that are meaningful to them; and all together sharing meaning by all together safeguarding the universal values without which no one’s worldview is meaningful to anyone.
*We hold that interpretations of spiritual Love into human life must be poetic; that human feelings, thoughts, words, and deeds can at best approximately and provisionally point-towards, rather than literally or definitively capture, Pure Love. Because human thought is finite, but the Love we must found our feeling/thinking/acting upon in order to be meaningful to ourselves would have to be infinite*. And you cannot contain Infiniti in the finite. So the best we could hope for is an ongoing self-observing, -critiquing, and -adjusting interaction with and interpretation of the divine Love that gently and clearly claims everyone and that also raucously and joyfully explodes through and overruns and conquers everyone.
*[Something Deeperism does not claim that one can logically demonstrate that Pure Love exists, or that we can relate meaningfully to It.
Something Deeperism merely points out that we cannot be meaningful to ourselves except to the degree that our feeling/thinking/acting is based upon a Reality = Love that motivates, justifies, and explicates the universal values (aware, honest, clear, … joyfully-together); and that if such a Reality = Love existed, It would be all there really was, so It would shine through everything, including each conscious moment:
And so like:
Why not try to organize our feeling/thinking/acting around Reality = Love? An understanding of the poetic nature of this inner quest; as well as the universal values and standard spiritual practices (prayer, meditation, fellowship, contemplation, study, practicing humility service and loving kindness): Those boundaries can all work together to help keep us focused on living in and through and for Pure Love — as opposed to sliding deeper and deeper into inevitable (we are humans, after all) daydreams about how our own notions are the TRUTH.
(We’re positing that Pure Love is the TRUTH; but that our ideas and feelings about Pure Love are of course not the TRUTH; hence the ongoing poetic dance of trying to interpret Pure Love into our ideas and feelings. Picture it like how you can get better and better at interpreting feelings into ideas and words by feeling/thinking more aware, clear, honest, and competent — even though feelings are wider and deeper than ideas. Likewise, we will try to get better and better at interpreting Pure Love into feelings and ideas by working to feel/think/act more aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, and joyfully-sharing.)
Something Deeperism is kind of like Pascal’s Wager:
We’ve nothing to lose if we seek a Love = Reality that motivates, justifies, and explicates the universal values and standard spiritual practices; and we gain everything (meaningfulness-to-ourselves; i.e. internal coherency; i.e. the ability to meaningfully travel with and steer our own feeling/thinking (rather than just being tossed about by notions we cannot understand, believe in, or even care about) to the degree we discover Love = Reality within each conscious moment and work with It to organize the rest of our conscious experiences around It.]
It was Tuesday, November 5th, 2024 at 4PM on the East Coast of these United States. I thought of being a Knight of Faith for love of country. I thought maybe my faith could be that of course God would not let us elect Donald Trump after what he and his GOP had done. Maybe I started too late? But I think I had had this thought before. I think I’d tried it out here and there. Maybe “trying it out here and there” is a textbook example of how to tell if you’re not actually a Knight of Faith at all, but are instead just another pseudo-intellectual dabbling in ideas you don’t even want to fully grasp?
The Knight of Faith is certain he will get the girl, or he is certain God will ratify his contributions and bring him both spiritual and worldly success (like an actor who prays to be a star, having somehow gotten it into his head that movie fame is somehow part of his true path, somehow part of how he glorifies God in this life and has fun while doing it, somehow supposing that glorifying God is supposed to be fun), or he is certain God will not actually demand that he sacrifice Isaac. But every step of the way, the Knight of Faith is willing to accept God’s refusal of the earthly gift that he is certain God cannot withhold. He is willing to die alone after hearing about how the girl married some other guy and settled down into some other dream; he is willing that God let him die in squalor and without ever having that success that he had thought his soul-centered* efforts merited; he is willing to plunge his dagger into Isaac’s heart, thereby destroying himself and everything he loved — except God; for in his faith he swore that even if God should demand this sacrifice of him, he would never turn from God.
*[At least as far as he could tell, he was faithfully centering all his work on the infinite Love that is enough for everyone.]
Cases 1 and 2 seem innocuous enough. Case 3 has always given me pause.
The Knight of Faith believes that God acts in this world and that humans can relate meaningfully enough to God to have some sense of God’s plan for them in this life. Right? Or does the Knight of Faith believe he doesn’t know what God’s up to or if God exists, but still he leaps into the faith that God will be there to catch him, and that God will nourish his spiritual being and even grant him those earthly wishes that he makes with a pure heart and that he correctly intuits are part of God’s plan for his life? Or is it that the Knight of Faith tells God what he himself thinks his life should look like (rather than guessing what he thinks God wants for his life), and he then trusts that God will agree and will ratify his plan for his own life?
Or does the Knight of Faith understand that he doesn’t know what God wills for his life, or how much God is willing to let him choose his own path, or how much God is willing to grant his own requests for his own life; but rather than worry about such unknowable metaphysical details, the Knight of Faith trusts that God will love him, protect him, guide him (all of which are pretty standard religious notions — particularly if one tweaks the “protect” and “guide” parts so one is being protected from spiritual folly and guided to spiritual salvation), and also grant him his heart wish in this life (? and it is here that a person becomes either a Knight of Faith or a silly superstitious person hassling God for material favors and otherwise confusing worldly longings for spiritual longings?)?
The case of the lover seems very different from the case of Abraham. The lover doesn’t hear God telling him that he will win his beloved or that he should win her or that he should wait forever for her. The lover just wishes for earthly human union with his beloved with all his being and with what he feels to be a pure heart, and he makes the leap of faith that God will grant him this his heart wish, the wish of his pure and naked heart. But Abraham in the story thought God told him that in his and Sarah’s old age, they would have a son; and then the son was born to them; and they rejoiced and praised the Lord; and then Abraham thought God commanded him to take Isaac up to Mount Moriah and sacrifice (that is to say, kill dead as an offering to God) Isaac his son and pride and joy and treasure. Those are two extremely different cases. The lover is a romantic who’s pushed his romanticism into the realm of the theological; he’s not hearing voices and he’s not raising a dagger over anyone’s breast.
I think the story of Abraham is holy insofar as whoever wrote it thought and felt his way to a God that did not want humans to sacrifice humans to God. In that time and place, that counted as theological progress — as a more correct interpretation of Pure Love into human feeling, thinking, and acting. Well, that thought just came to me right now as I was here editing this essay.
Anyway, something to think about; let us return to our essay:
The story of Abraham cannot be understood literally in this time and place. For we must operate under the assumption that anyone here and now who believes God is telling them to sacrifice their children is not hearing God’s voice, but is under the sway of something else entirely. The story of Isaac and Abraham on Mount Moriah is a riddle that cannot be literally solved by humans living here and now. It can be a koan, perhaps; but it cannot be a meaningful thought experiment. “What would I do if I sincerely believed God commanded me to slaughter my child?” What could you do, but check yourself into a mental hospital? Wouldn’t any other course of action be spiritual hubris to the point of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? For if we’re to have any chance at being meaningful to ourselves, we must relate meaningfully to spiritual Love; but if spiritual Love is asking us to murder others, then spiritual Love is not behaving in a manner that we can meaningfully and reliably relate to; and so if spiritual Love bid us murder our child, spiritual Love is not something we can meaningfully interact with, and we are spiritually lost. And so if we sincerely believe God is commanding us to kill innocent children, we have no choice but to seek medical help and pray to God to speak to us for real, to come through this darkness that we for some reason cannot stop worshipping, and to heal us and bring us into enough real insight and enough real relationship with God to be able to live and act in a way that is meaningful to us (that is both spiritually grounded and meaningfully connected to our own internal rules for feeling, thinking, and acting — rules without which we cannot make sense to ourselves, and rules that we believe are there to help keep us honest in our quest to better and better connect with and follow God).
The Knight of Faith is therefore what? An unsolvable Biblical riddle grafted onto inappropriate modern analogies?
But we would be Knights of Faith for liberal representative democracy, and for the Godlight that we believe animates the following principles:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
So what we be? Not Abraham, nor even Isaac. Not Jesus, nor even the disciples. We’re alive here and now; as such we have rights and responsibilities that are different from those belonging to humans who survive now only in stories or perhaps our hearts. For Jesus and the Saints if they yet exist and if some of us are right to imagine they somehow relate to us: Well, that Jesus and those Saints are not the same as the stories told about them, and the best we can hope for from these stories is that we relate to them in a way that points us more towards the Living Christ than away from the Living Christ.
But your author is anyway a failed Something Deeperist, and every time he tries to talk to God he seems to just end up giving his own self bum advice. “God, should I send this letter?” he asks three times. And, three “Yes”es received, he sends the letter that he obviously should not have sent that was just mean and stupid to send. This then is the kind of spiritual failure he is working with*.
*[The theory of Something Deeperism is that one should seek to organize one’s feeling, thinking, and acting around a Pure Love shining through all things, including each conscious moment.
And that succeeding in this endeavor would constitute a kind of experimental proof for the existence of Pure Love: We could perhaps reach a tipping point within our conscious moment where it became more true for us to say, “I believe that Reality is Love and that we are all in this together, bound in and through and for that perfect spiritual Love” than it is true for us to point towards our sense of things in some other, less PureLovey-dovey way. We envision that tipping point would be a whole-being poetic insight that would point our feeling/thinking towards a reliable sense of the Truth of Love = Reality.
Unlike intellectual and/or emotional proofs of God, such a whole-being (ideas, feelings, etc-mundane-aspects-of-consciousness all relating imperfectly but still meaningfully to the Pure Love aspect of consciousness) experiential proof would be only a starting point — a call to action to work every moment to widen and deepen our sense of the Love that choses everyone, and to better and better follow that Love.
That’s the theory.
However, in practice, we see rather a lot of overlap with belief in magic — which everyone knows is a symptom of OCD, and not a spiritual gift at all. And so we let “God” tell us to send letters that we shouldn’t send, and otherwise make trouble in the name of the Holy Spirit. Is this not blasphemy?
Well, I don’t remember the letter mentioning the Holy Spirit, or otherwise claiming spiritual authority. It was just the decision-making process that was a little wayward. Well, I mean, the letter itself wasn’t the best, but it contained no pretensions at divine authority. Anyway: we just need to tweak the process of organizing our feeling/thinking/acting around Pure Love: nothing that a little spiritual refinement can’t correct!
And where is that refinement? What’s on the menu for lunch today? Red wine with a side of red wine?
Anyway.
Anyway! That’s your answer for everything! You just keep on anywaying, why don’t you? You go right ahead and anyway your way to eternal perdition!
Anyway.]
And yet this author — bedraggled and bummed as he may be — would be a Knight of Faith and would follow God here and now, confident in God’s place in his life and in the life of this nation and this world: that government of for and by the people should not perish on this earth, but that should instead bounce with more joyful gentle kindly competency than before — both here in our little inland empire and out beyond into the wider world, which (let’s get real for a moment, s’il vous plait) is no more nor less deserving of God’s abundance than we are.
What about this? We could be a Knight of Faith for God enlightening us as a nation and world enough to all together move towards the better and away from the worse. We could combine a Knight of Faith project with our Wisdom Meme Project. Actually, we kind of already started this: Here’s the Wisdom Meme we linked to in Diary of Adamant Lover Chapter 60: Wisdom Memes. We wrote DAL a couple summers ago — half the book was written like 2015, and mostly just capers on; the second half was concentrated on saving the nation from any possible Trumpian dictatorship, and mostly just collapses flailing and moaning all over the place.
Maybe it isn’t too late for a wisdom meme that enlightens us all together? At least enough to all together protect our shared government from chaos and corruption? But how? What are the words of this irresistible koan*? How could they be anything except a combination of The Greatest Commandment and The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution? But didn’t we already combine those elements? I think we ought to include the Academic Skeptics being surprised by joy when they suspended all judgement, as well as the Buddhist notion of the wise resting on impermanence and interdependency.
*[A normal koan requires spiritual effort and contemplation — generally a standard koan will only crack the seeker open to the wider Truth via consistent pure-/open-hearted contemplations. That’s the beauty of the wisdom meme: It irresistibly leads to a lasting and self-nourishing spiritual enlightenment. Well, that would be the beauty of the wisdom meme, if we could just find the right configuration of words so as to create it.]
But haven’t we done all that already?
Maybe we didn’t put it all together well enough. Also maybe we should include more of the nuts and bolts of how governments can keep themselves from slipping into tyrannies in general, as well as measures that could be taken here and now.
But no, wait, I think we did already fit all this stuff into a world-enlightening, democracy-spreading wisdom meme. Or at least already give a real solid go. Remember? Diary of an Adamant Lover? And no one even noticed, and there was no measurable increase in either individual or group wisdom — if anything, recent events suggest that we’re doing a better and better job of selecting for folly and a worse and worse job of selecting for wisdom. So why imagine that we’ll create a helpful wisdom meme now, or that, even if we do, it will actually help?
But well that’s the whole Knight of Faith game. We will hand ourselves over to God with the prayer that God use us to speak the truth here and now in a way that helps us all as a nation and a world to see and act on the Absolute Truth as It bounces through the various essential practical truths of this moment. And then we will live every day in the faith that God will help us to find the right words. It’s like how Jesus told the disciples not to worry about what they say, because the Holy Spirit will speak through them. Or was that Paul? Or did they both say it?
Oh, here we go. Actually, it’s down a little bleaker street than we’d recollected:
“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard; you will be handed over to the local councils and be flogged in the synagogues. On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles. But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”
[Matthew 10:16-20, New International Version]
Matthew 10 is also where the disciples are told that if people in a town are not hospitable, they should shake the dust off their feet at that town:
” … If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. Truly I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.”
[Matthew 10:13:15]
That always struck me as a little excessive. Actually just straight up excessive, without the “a little” qualifier.
There’s no scruting the Bible. One can’t be sure exactly what Jesus said and what other people thought he did or should’ve said when they wrote down what he said decades after he said what he said. And then one can’t be sure exactly what Jesus’s relationship to the divine was either in his life or afterwards. Like even supposing he’s somehow a Messiah, that doesn’t mean he got everything exactly right in his lifetime. Humans don’t get everything right; and when we assume Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, we assume that spending those thirty-some years as a fully-human person is part of his mission. And even if Jesus manages to get a sentence to perfectly sync up with Reality as It relates to human realities, and even if that sentence gets written down precisely as it was said — well, it was written down in Greek, not Aramaic; plus Jesus had to translate Reality into finite human language, so none of his sentences can sync up perfectly with Reality; and even if his words could point perfectly towards Reality within his understanding, neither his original audience nor those of us reading his words today can climb back through his sentences to the Reality that the described. I mean: Sure, we can climb through them poetically and get some meaningful sense of what the words might mean, but that’s not literal knowledge, that’s a gist-of, a pointing-towards, a general-direction of interpretation.
Perhaps Christians can accept Jesus into their hearts and find thereby a guide to the scriptures. But still they are humans, and they disagree among themselves about how to interpret the Bible and whether or not Jesus is likely to have said this or that line attributed to him.
Books about what is prior to human ideas and feelings cannot be literally true or false; and even if they could be, we are not able to interpret them perfectly enough to gain literal insight from their testimonies.
If only Jesus had left some kind of a key for how to poetically interpret his words and deeds in a way that would allow us to gain more wisdom than folly from our Bible studies and religious activities!
Oh, wait: here’s something:
In all three synoptic Gospels — generally scholarly considered to be the most historically accurate portrayals of Jesus’s words and deeds –, there is a story of someone asking Jesus what the most important Commandment is; and in every story, Jesus answers that question pretty much the same way. How useful! Insofar as we can hope to trust the Bible, the central figure of Christianity has given us a key to the Christian scriptures and to the Holy life. So we have a simple rule of thumb:
If our interpretations of scripture and life help us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves, then we are headed in the right direction. “On these two commandments hang all the law and all the prophets.” [Matthew 22:40, New Revised Standard Version] “There is no commandment greater than these.” [Mark 12:31, NRSV]
Also note that the version in Luke makes it seem like it wasn’t just Jesus who thought those commandments were the essential ones:
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
[Luke 10:25-28]
That passage suggests that Jesus’s answer was at least readily available to other students of the law — if not already a consensus reading in at least some schools of thought.
Note also that Jesus didn’t say, “follow this commandment plus xzy other formula for spiritual success, and you will live”; he just said, “do this, and you will live.”
If the Bible has much meaningful relationship to what Jesus said and did, then Jesus’s thrice-repeated Great Commandment gives both Christians and other spiritual seekers a pretty good hint about (1) what Jesus believed the point of the religious life was, and probably also (2) what other First Century Jews thought was a very good answer to the question of what is the most important commandment.
Is the Jesus difference (assuming there is substantial a theological difference between Jesus and other Jewish preachers in First Century Palestine) to be found in his response to the Lukian lawyers, “Who is my neighbor?” Did Jesus’s story of a Samaritan (then considered to be theological antagonists, even though the religions are quite similar [think Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland??]) being more neighborly to an injured Jew than some of his fellow Jews theologically challenge his listeners? Or was it as obvious then as it is now that whoever actually bothers to help you is the one who is being your neighbor?
Actually, I think the story goes further than that: Because often we help other people in our own tribe because they are in our tribe and we need to stick together and be better than all the other tribes who suck and blow and aren’t even quite humans actually when you get right down to it I’m sorry to say. But the Good Samaritan does not have tribalism as a motivation to help an injured man; are his motivations for helping the injured man therefore more likely to be more pure?, more based in loving God with all his being and everyone else as if they were himself — as if they too were what in his faith he believes us all to be: children of and vessels for the Living God?
But you and I just walk on by the smelly ragged bums and junkies. And many of us if we are honest in this polarized fishbowl: well, many of us can’t hardly even stand to listen to our political opponents anymore — they’re so dumb and gross. So what use do we have for Jesus’s most important commandment? And if we cannot reasonably expect ourselves to be the Good Samaritan, why pretend that we’re followers of Jesus Christ, or that we’re serious seekers of Holiness and thus have some meaningful insight into Jesus and his teachings?
What is the point of kidding ourselves? Jesus said what the point of the spiritual life was. We agree. And we just keep on living as if the Good Samaritan was a fun children’s story, but not anything like a meaningful, practicable call-to-action.
What is the point of kidding ourselves?
The irony of Donald Trump is that he himself offers a completely Machiavellian take on politics: Honesty is for suckers, ceding power when you lose an election means you’re a real loser and a sucker, serving those who vote against you is for suckers and dopes, all-reality-is-political, might-makes-right, you’re-with-me-or-I-will-break-you: that’s his been his approach to politics. And yet! And yet, many of his voters believe he’s here on a mission from God. And even many of his more ardent secular supporters often seem to attribute some mystical, quasi-spiritual value to this man.
Why? Didn’t Jesus say that you would be able to tell a tree by the fruit it bears? Or is that Jesus didn’t mean what the tree said and did, or how it treated other people and the systems that keeps us all safe from tyranny, or whether or not it abused its political authority for private gain; but simply whether or not the tree would appoint Supreme Court justices likely to revoke Roe versus Wade? Is that what Jesus meant by how a tree bears fruit?
When people accept Donald Trump’s methods in the name of God’s work in this world, I collapse and rot within my tired lonely shell. For if Donald Trump’s methods are compatible with spiritual virtues, how can we humans be meaningful to ourselves? His disregard for truth and fairness, his reduction of everything to the simple categories of materialistic “win” or “lose”: This is nihilism because it rests upon values that no human soul can find any real value within — on values that deny the reality and worth of the spiritual.
Why make a government’s leadership serve temporarily and at the pleasure of the governed? Isn’t the idea that the citizens will serve as a final check on madness and corruption in government? And at what point do a free people say “enough is enough” if not at the point of watching a politician try to steal an election, and then base his reelection campaign on lies about that election, along with not-so-subtle-hints that he will definitely do a better job this time of using the power of the government to punish political opponents, silence dissent, enrich himself, and entrench his power independent of the people’s will?
But maybe We the People aren’t really all the useful. Maybe we’re only as good as the media and the politicians that serve us. And maybe the evil here can really be traced first to Mike Johnson’s use of the constitution to create a smokescreen behind which many Republicans could hide behind as they nodded along with Trump’s complaints without quite going so far as to say the election actually was stolen; and then to Fox News’s economic decision to pivot away from honestly reporting that Trump lost in 2020 and towards mollycoddling those viewers who had some psychological need to believe that Donald Trump is the Truth and everything that disagrees with Donald Trump is some kind of nefarious plot and/or evil contraption? Or maybe we can trace the turn towards evil first to how the Republican Senate didn’t even seriously consider the possibility that Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election might be an impeachable offense? Perhaps we can trace the evil to how the Republican Party has — via the filibuster in the Senate, gerrymandering in the House, and the Electoral College, and voter discouragement campaigns at the state level — been sheltered from a fair fight for decades; plus how the right-wing news media has been sliding towards an industry dedicated primarily to protecting their viewers from cognitive dissonance, rather than an industry dedicated primarily to reporting pertinent facts to their viewers. It’s as if some aspects of the totalitarian state were already in place and — though it took a good long minute when maybe the GOP media, voters, and leadership could’ve chosen to reject Donald Trump’s behaviors and with them his candidacy — recognized themselves in Donald Trump and so were like, “Yeah!, that’s the path we’re on taking to its logical conclusion!”
But did Kamala Harris run a poor campaign? Or was she just too black, tan, and female? Or is it, as I suspect: None of the above. Not that Donald Trump ran a good campaign, but that the US voters don’t make their decisions based on abstract concepts like what is good for democracy and their ability to act as a final check on madness and corruption in government and to keep their government from being a place where honesty faithful stewardship and competency are punished rather than rewarded; but that we vote instead like amoebas registering little bits of comfort and discomfort, and sliding carefully towards the more comfortable (like when a relatively popular sitting president easily wins reelection) and jerking violently and desperately away from “less comfortable than I remember my baseline as being”?
But what of Alan Lichtman’s famous keys? If we’re just amoebas poutily and selfishly flinching towards or away from sensations of more or less pleasure, why flinch away from Biden when so few of Alan Lichtman’s keys were triggered? Maybe his keys are bunk; or maybe it has more to do with the population’s perception of those keys: It is not a coincidence that the MAGA alternate reality coincides with anti-US disinformation campaigns from Russia and China. The sense that everything is falling apart under the Democrats pervades MAGA and is the cherry picked reality of Fox News: perhaps that faux reality has reached a tipping point where a critical mass of the public is now feeling more economic pain than they in their own lives actually feel and more angst over immigrants than they in their own lives actually feel? I can remember hearing of several surveys where people said the economy was bad, although not in their lives: out there somewhere in the nation, somehow being scary and doubtless stalking them.*
*[Please find an example or two]
By voting for Donald Trump, We the People have voted for nihilism. How can humans make meaningful collective decisions based on truth-is-whatever-my-side-needs-it-to-be, might-makes-right, playing-by-the-rules-is-for-suckers, and a zero-sum winner-takes-all and leaders-serve-only-their-supporters us-versus-them politics in not just international but also in internal conflicts? In the first place, these values are not meaningful to individual human beings — they point us away from an honest engagement in the Love that is True and that Knows that and in what sense it is True to say “We are all in this together forever”. And we cannot collectively share meaning by collectively embracing values that are meaningless to all of us. So how can we share meaning if some meaningful percentage of us support politicians with a consistent history of campaigning on and acting on those soulless-thus-to-humans-meaningless values?
Again, the argument is not so much that some sizable portion of the public embraces Donald Trump’s nihilistic approach to politics, but that a critical mass of the electorate has no interest and/or capacity for rejecting nihilism and demanding politicians abide by values that are meaningful to human beings.
How can we move from this moment of collectively selecting for nihilism? How can we move into some kind of shareable meaning?
And how can we get people with a religious devotion to Donald Trump to agree that the fruits we should all be watching for are not immediate partisan victories but honesty, accuracy, competency, faithful stewardship, respects for the checks and balances on one’s own powers, tolerance for political disagreements and media critiques, and a steady refusal to abuse the power of government to enrich oneself personally or entrench oneself politically?
After all, we can’t know in what way and to what degree God is influencing events in this world; but we can know whether or not, for example, Donald Trump ignored the emoluments clause and used his power as presidency to make hundreds of millions of dollars in hotel fees*, attempted to overturn the 2020 election by pressuring fellow Republicans to cheat and lie for him*, openly stated that he will use the Department of Justice to go after political foes*, routinely lied about having the 2020 election stolen from him as well as indulging in a pattern of dishonesty that dwarfs any other recent US politicians (setting aside those MAGA politicians who have risen up in his wake, echoing and amplifying his lies)*. That we can see; that we can monitor; that we can say, “No” to.
*[Footnotes please]
It is a vainglory to imagine that we have enough insight into the divine plan to vote based on our insight into the divine plan. And then to use such a vainglorious daydreamed wisdom to blow off the real wisdom that we all do in fact have and can in fact share!!! It boggles the mind. It crushes the heart. It sickens the gut, sucks the blood out of the marrows, and flushes the spirit down the tubes.
The joy of liberal democratic republic is that we are all safe to stand up for honesty, fair play, competency, and decency in government; and that we can argue ideas and go home friends without having to worry about being slandered, bankrupted, imprisoned, or murdered for speaking our minds.
It is fun. It is joyful. It is livable. It is human in the best ways — together tussling within the bounds and thus together seeking to best follow the spiritual Love and universal values without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us. It is fun because it is not violent or cruel or oppressive. It is fun because we play a game in which there are no losers, only winners: A healthy liberal representative government selects for honesty, faithful, competent, well-intentioned, and actually-helpful stewardship and for win-wins. In a tyranny, everyone loses because the leadership is not even trying to find what is best for everyone, but is only trying to figure out how to keep and abuse the power of the state.
Maybe that joy could be our entry back to shared meaning?
What if we forgive Donald Trump and Fox News and Mike Johnson and Donald’s fanatic supporters and those who just grumpy-voted their way into ratifying his nihilism? What if we could convince Joe Biden to pardon Donald Trump? And maybe the various governors to pardon his state charges? What if we give Donald Trump a clean slate and ask him to be a good president?
He hasn’t yet committed any crimes in his second Administration. Why not ask him to be a faithful steward of our democratic republic, and suggest that he chose the immortal fame of mortals?
For what sense or understanding have they? They follow minstrels and take the multitude for a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best men choose one thing above all – immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.
[Heraclitus of Ephesus. The last sentence is Fragment 29. The first part seems to be a version of fragment 104: For what thought or wisdom have they? They follow the poets and take the crowd as their teacher, knowing not that there are many bad and few good.]
Though this logos is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this logos, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it truly is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.
[Fragment 1]
So we must follow the common, yet though my logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.
[Fragment 2]
Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things.
[Fragment 41]
Why not get the citizenry, the GOP, and Donald Trump fired up for Beauty = Truth = Goodness = Justice?
Why not surprise us all and keep Lina Kahn on at the FTC and guarantee her independence? After all, if we want an economy that serves the people instead of the wealthiest 1%, shouldn’t we lessen the wealthiest companies’ and individuals’ concentration of economic power? It is a myth that people have what they earned in this country: They have what they earned under a certain set of rules that have over the last forty years evolved to favor the very wealthiest. That’s not to denigrate anyone’s success, but to put it in the context of those political decisions that have allowed the economic winners to run away with the game. Nobody’s trying to impoverish Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, but they could still be crazy rich and would probably have less security concerns if this country’s politicians created a more egalitarian economic playing field.
Why not surprise us all and forgo Section F, and leave career bureaucrats at their posts, rather than replacing thousands or tens of thousands of them with political appointees? After all, if we want a nation that serves the people instead of the powerful, shouldn’t we let competent administrators do their job, rather than replacing them with people who will be more interested in pleasing the president than in making sure they do their job honesty and competently?
Why not surprise us all and pursue a measured, humane, and economically sustainable immigration policy? After all, who can be happy living in a land that terrorizes the most vulnerable among us?
Why not surprise us all and lay off the press and political rivals, choose your words carefully and honestly, and let the DOJ maintain its independence from the presidency? After all, if we want America to be great, don’t we mean we want that fun joyous hustle and bustle that comes of a free people arguing ideas and then going home as friends, safe in the knowledge that the government will neither retaliate against them, nor allow others to retaliate against them for sharing their political thoughts with the wider world?
Why not pursue a responsible, sustainable budget and regulatory program, rather than indulging in the long-discredited daydream that tax cuts and deregulation will bring about Shang Ra La?
Why not use your status as a “maverick” to surprise Putin who thinks you are useful dupe, and protect Ukrainians — who are spilling their own blood so that we don’t have to face an expanding Russian empire that may require us to spill our own?
And ditto in Israel? Use your strongman creds to get Netanyahu to lay off the Gazans and otherwise stop the bloodshed.
And why not less rather than more nuclear weapons? After all, at some point if everyone keeps pointing nukes at everyone else, well: at some point we’re all going down.
Your fans will applaud you no matter what you do. So why not just humbly and gently serve the entire nation? Why not? What’s it to you? You’ll be dead soon. Your family will be rich even if you abide by the emoluments clause and divest your holdings — or at least refrain from attempting to install an Obran-style kleptocracy. You’ve learned how to corrupt the GOP and you’ve seen how you can more successfully make the US government more of a permanent tyranny and less of a free country with a temporary leadership serving the people rather than themselves and their cronies. But in that lesson, you’ve also learned how boring that kind of shit is, and that you don’t have to do it — you could just work within the system to do the best job you can within a free nation full of the fun and joy and bustle of a free people unafraid to publicly speak the truth and stand up for good government and the universal values without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us.
It could be fun!
And the irony is is that this is the America you remember. This is the fun you remember. This is the greatness you remember — that time before forty years of neoliberal policies and anti-campaign-finance-laws and twenty years of rampant gerrymandering and the routine abuse of the filibuster and dystopian mediascapes squeezed the many economically while also robbing them of both meaningful political power and a shared reality.
Why not?
Perhaps I just need to find the right wisdom meme to help this ball roll towards the joyful raucous of freedom and away from the soul-squelching morose of tyranny.
Yes, something like:
the point of life is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself
PLUS
it’s self-evident that all people are created equal and are endowed with certain rights including life liberty and the pursuit of happiness
PLUS
it’s joyful and meaningful fun to live in a nation where you can stand up honesty, accuracy, competency, and faithful stewardship in government without being crushed by the government or by goons whose crimes are protected by the government
PLUS
it’s joyfully wholesome to collectively share meaning by collectively safeguarding the universal values and serving as a final check on corruption and madness in government
PLUS
we cannot judge our own or our leaders’ souls, but we can together pay enough attention and source our information carefully enough to notice and push back on leaders when they are dishonest, incompetent, and/or when they attack those limits on individual powers that keep this a government of by and for the people, rather than of for and by the tyrant
PLUS
the wise rest on impermanence and interdependence like birds rest on the air or fish rest in the water
PLUS
when the Academic Skeptics suspended all judgement, they were surprised by an unsought-for joy
PLUS
none of our worldviews make sense to any of us except to the degree we organize our feeling/thinking/acting around spiritual Love; but Pure Love is wider and deeper than our ideas and feelings about It; so interpreting It into feeling/thinking/acting cannot be literal/definitive but must be a poetic (poetically pointing-towards rather than literally grasping) and ongoing (requiring constant self-reflection, -critique, and -revision); and to meaningfully flow in and out of Pure Love (which we picture as an infinite spiritual Light shining through everything, including each conscious moment) we must stay within the guardrails of thought without which none of our feeling/thinking/acting makes sense to any of us: that is to say, to relate meaningfully to Pure Love, one’s feeling/thinking/acting must abide by the universal values of aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing.
PLUS
In a liberal democratic republic, we can work together to help keep our nation safe for people who would stand up for the universal values in public life (i.e. who would demand honesty, transparency, fair play, and competency from their elected officials). And by maintaining that environment, we can share meaning (by together agreeing to prioritize the universal values in the public sphere, we can share those values without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us) as we work together to influence our shared conversation and shared government — all while serving as a final check on madness and corruption in government.
‘CAUSE
It’s fun! It’s beautiful! To live in a land where you can argue ideas, but then go home friends safe in the knowledge that the government will not retaliate against people for speaking their minds, and it will not allow anyone else to retaliate against people for standing up for honest, accuracy, competency …
Is that enough?
We looped around some of the same topic over and over again
Maybe we could refine the wisdom meme into something catchy?
Just as Christians betrays their faith to the degree they behave counter to the Greatest Commandment, the leaders of our constitutional liberal representative government betray this nation to the degree they use the tools of government to undermine a government of for and by the people with checks balances and limits on individual powers and with guaranteed individual rights like the freedom to criticize the government without fearing retaliation.
Does that work?
Maybe if we throw in the joy of living in a nation where the government does not punish people for demanding that the government be honest, accurate, competent, and that their leaders abide by the the same universal laws as everyone else?
Or maybe we could just be cool about things, and say like
Hey, listen Donald:
You’ve won and hip hip hooray
So like
what if you now start considering how much you value winning versus how much you value the light glinting off the water or a smile from someone you love? What is love? And why do the saints say one must love everyone 100%? Doesn’t that amount to loving everyone equally? Where’s the specialness in being loved by someone if they love Godlight with every bit of themselves, and they love themselves and everyone else as if everyone was a child of and vessel for Godlight? And, for that matter, where’s the specialness of being president if you’re just here to serve the nation, putting their safety and thriving ahead of your own??? What if specialness was overrated?, was a misunderstanding? What if a moment alive is already infinitely special?
You know why a little sleaze and crime was fun in the 80s?
Because it was contained within a larger system of fair play, honesty, and the universal rule of law.
Yes!
I’m not kidding.
Think it over.
Feel it in your gut; feel that bright revelation roll around with hamburger fries and soda.
So this is how I see the pardoning speech:
Biden pardons and then someone eloquent gives a careful speech outlining why so many people are so scared right now, and how we can work together to help Donald Trump avoid those kinds of errors, and instead be the kind of president that deep down inside he would like to be — a president who makes the US healthier, stronger, and more joyful.
Like
Explain how kleptocracies work, how Orban’s Hungary has headed down that road and how Putin’s Russia is a smoothly operating criminal state; and point out how lonely and boring it is to live in a government where people are rewarded not for telling the truth and serving the public confidently and faithfully, but for collaborating with top-down crime. Maybe gangster movies are kind of fun and exciting, but thugocracies are actually boring lonely sad affairs.
And explain how Donald Trump enriched himself privately as president from 2016 to 2020, and how that’s not really okay, but what we fear now is a much more extensive system of rewarding cronies and punishing honesty and competency.
And how might a Trumpian kleptocracy look? If Section F is eliminated and civil servants are replaced with political operatives, a long-established bulwark against corruption within the Executive branch will be destroyed. And then maybe point out that conservatives have long complained that the Executive branch has gotten too powerful and too bloated and that a lot of the services provided by the federal bureaucracy should be done by congress; but that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 does not have a plan to either shrink the administrative state or to help Congress to serve as a better check on the Executive branch — they just have a plan for replacing tens of thousands of career civil servants with rightwing Yes-people who, with no Section F to protect Federal bureaucrats, will be incentivized to (1) prioritize pleasing Trump over doing a good solid job for the American people; and (2) do anything within their power to make sure the government stays Trumpian so they can continue to have a job.
I don’t know all the details, but the speech should have (1) we pardon Donald Trump to give him as the incoming president a blank slate, and (2) this is why we’re so afraid that Donald Trump might do irreparable harm to our democracy, and these are the signs we’re going to be watching for — financial corruption, punishing political rivals, silencing political dissent, et cetera; and here’s how we think each of these categories might play out; and here’s our plan for trying to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t take the nation down that road, but instead works within the bounds of our liberal representative government, which is a spiritual Good because it creates an environment where people can both stand up for the universal values in the public sphere, and not fear that the government will either crush them or let others crush them; and also because it allows people to relax enough to admit that they already share meaning — they already share the universal values and the Love that animates and explicates them –, and so they already can and should work together to nudge their shared conversation and government towards the better and away from the worst, while most fundamentally refereeing the system itself, and serving as a final check on madness and corruption in government while also simultaneously working to improve the government so that it is more responsive to us citizens and to educate us citizens so that we can be better stewards of our shared government.
And then, along with giving Donald Trump a clean slate and informing him and the public what why we fear for our democracy and how we’re going to try to keep the nation within the bounds of democracy and the universal rule of law, we should be figuring out how to shore up systems for protecting the vulnerable, speaking the truth, and keeping our nation an active democracy.
For example, billionaires should sink resources into the free press. For example, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong should convert the Washington Post and LA times, respectively, into independent nonprofits who are steered by an independent board of journalists committed to careful, honest, accurate, and responsible journalism. Because if they maintain leadership of the papers, they could be pressured by Donald Trump to manipulate their papers in order to not lose out on government business, or — if things get bad enough — simply to avoid government financial punishments. And also I think somebody like Bill Gates should create an independent review of journalistic practices and as long as periodicals remain within the guidelines of honest accurate responsible journalism (I don’t know how exactly to deal with FoxNewsian cherry-picking and spinning stories to create the an illusionary reality carefully cultivated to shelter viewers from any hint of cognitive dissonance; perhaps some scientific method for assessing cherry-picking and spin??), and come up with a system that allows people to read these papers without getting hung up on paywalls — maybe something like a not-for-profit Spotify? But Spotify squeezes music makers; we don’t want our system to do that to journalists. Anyway, we’ll again need wonks to work out the details.
And there should be an active watch for government abuse — but very carefully focused only on real instances of corruption, retaliation, and oppression/silencing. And billionaires should also give ACLU and other legal organizations resources so that immigrants, journalists, activists, and other vulnerable groups have someone on their side if Trump tries to steamroll them.
And there should be a push for ads and free courses on how to be a responsible consumer of information, and how our government works, and how to think critically in our private and public lives.
And part of this education should involve a discussion of how much money we waste on political advertising because we cannot make meaningful campaign finance laws without either changing the USSC or passing some amendments to the constitution; and also information about the lobbying industry’s outsized influence on the government.
Also: we should talk about ranked choice voting systems, and expanding the US House of Representatives to undo the effects of gerrymandering and make the House of Representatives more representative of their constituencies.
Oh, and how to deal with this stupid system in which the most extreme voters chose which candidates will run in the general elections?
And what about the filibuster that’s evolved in the last few decades from being exceptional to procedural? That procedural filibuster makes the system less democratic, and that generally advantages the GOP; but right now it would be hard for the Democrats to want to see it go.
Anyway, the point is (1) don’t automatically assume Donald Trump will undermine democracy — give him and his GOP the benefit of the doubt: there’s no law requiring him to go through with the anti-democratic measures we his detractors have long feared Trump 2.0 would bring; and (2) carefully and calmly outline what we fear and how we are going to attempt to monitor and push back on Trump 2.0 if they begin to attack the foundations of our liberal (as in people can speak their mind without retaliation and everyone has to treat everyone equally — no special privileges for wealth, power, or connections) representative (as leaders serve temporarily and at the ballots-measured pleasure of the governed) government; while (3) putting resources into organizations that protect the vulnerable, protect the truth, and protect democracy.
Okay, but anyone can see all that. What the Knight of Faith is here for is to create the wisdom meme(s) needed to bust this nation’s soul open, so that we can together think clearly and move wisely.
Let’s strip the knight of Faith down to his most essential characteristics. Some have argued that people have three moral/metaphysical stages to choose from: The aesthetic life devoted to pleasure, the ethical life devoted to morality, and the spiritual life devoted to spirituality. I don’t think so. I think we humans need Truth = Beauty = Goodness = Justice to keep us on the true spiritual path. Spiritual Reality would have to wider and deeper than our ideas and feelings about It, so we cannot relate to Reality literally, but must instead attempt to poetically (pointing-towards rather than perfectly capturing; and provisionally rather than definitively) interpret Reality into life. But we’re constantly tempted to worship our own notions as the Truth, and in fact to some degree we cannot help but confuse our ideas and feelings about spiritual Reality for spiritual Reality. Therefore, to maintain a meaningful relationship with the spiritual Reality, we must stay within our intellectual/emotional rules-of-thought: the universal values (aware, … joyfully-together), spiritual ideals (Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Justice; and most of all Pure Love), and standard spiritual practices (prayer … loving-kindness) can serve as guardrails and help us stay true to the Love we are seeking to organize our feeling and thinking around. (Additionally, we cannot meaningfully relate to anything — including spiritual love — if we do not abide by our own inborn rules for feeling/thinking/acting).
A spirit-centered life is also an epistemologically, logically, morally, and emotionally sound one. If one attempts to overrule the universal values, spiritual ideals, or standard spiritual practices in the name of spiritual insight; one becomes procedurally less meaningful to oneself (because one is breaking those rules of thought that one must follow in order to be meaningful to oneself) as one also becomes less foundationally meaningful to oneself (because one is abandoning the values, rules, and practices that keep one from worshipping one’s own ideas and feelings, rather than worshipping the Love that is prior to one’s ideas and feelings — by doing this one signals to one’s own vanity that it [one’s own vaingloriousness] is right, is True, is God).
A modern day Abraham would not be the Father of Faith if he let God talk him into killing his son. Such a man would be confusing his own notions for the Truth and allowing these confusions to harm him and everyone else. There is no metaphysical suspension of the ethical because the ethical is one of the tools the divine has given us to help us stay true to the work of interpreting what is prior to ideas and feelings — spiritual Love* — into ideas and feelings — a work that must by definition be approximate, ongoing, and in need of constant revision.
*[The spiritual Love that chooses and is enough for, and in fact bursts asunder and overflows, everything and everyone as we all here flow together as one illusion — an illusion that is eternally and infinitely swamped by the Love that is Real (miraculously unironic side note: the aesthetic is there to help our poetry both on stay the right track and not overextend itself).]
The Knight of Faith lives for Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Justice. The only faith that can bear fruit is the one that assumes that spiritual Love is Real and that we humans can relate meaningfully to spiritual Love — but assuming that humans can relate meaningfully to spiritual Love implies that we assume that spiritual Love can help us to better abide by and understand those rules for feeling/thinking/acting that we must abide by in order to be meaningful to ourselves (the universal values: aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing — to the degree we blow them off, our own feeling/thinking/acting is meaningless to us).
The Knight of Faith lives for a Reality = Love that motivates, justifies, and explicates the universal values, spiritual ideals, and standard spiritual practices. We humans need the Truth for a firm foundation for our feeling/thinking/acting — otherwise we slip and slide in relative truths that we can’t really even care about, let alone understand or believe in –; but if the Truth is not a gentle Love that chooses and is enough for everyone, we are also not able to understand, believe in, or care about the Truth. We humans can be meaningful to ourselves only to the degree that we follow a Truth that is Love and that motivates, justifies, and explicates the universal values and the universal spiritual practices (meditation, prayer, fellowship, study, reflection, practicing humility loving kindness and service): A Reality that works with us as we are is our only hope for internal coherence (meaningfulness-to-ourselves): And so the Knight of Faith must abide by moral, aesthetic, epistemological, logical, and et cetera intellectual/emotional internal rules if he is to meaningfully live in and through and for spiritual Love.
So no more leap of faith?
Every moment we leap into the faith that the spiritual life is the True one; but in that leap we seek to relate meaningfully with Pure Love so that a real and meaningful relationship with Pure Love can serve as the bedrock of our feeling, thinking, and acting. It’s like this: You leap into the arms of God, but with the understanding that you are a human and liable to error and so you cannot just leap and assume whatever catches you will be God: You have to leap in the faith that God is Good, and God’s Goodness has a place for and can connect with your feeling, thinking, and acting — and you need to think, feel, and act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind and joyfully-together in order to be able to understand and thus meaningfully travel with your own feeling/thinking to your own conclusions.
The leap of faith is an ongoing, self-observing -critiquing and -adjusting effort. Every moment we try to stand up a little straighter within ourselves, to push out from within so that there’s a little less space between the Love shining through everything (including each conscious moment) and our feeling, thinking, and acting. Our faith is that this life is fundamentally a spiritual one, and our work is to get better and better at reflecting the spirit in our lives. This is not the work of a dogmatist trying to force human ideas into being eternal Truths; it is the work of a spiritual poet working every moment to better experience, relate to, and reflect the infinite vista within each of us. That’s not to say that some dogmas aren’t superior to others; merely that the work of faith amounts to relating what is finite to what is infinite — to bridging the spiritual Reality and the particulars of human thoughts and actions –; and so the work of faith is primarily a poetic interpretation of the divine into feeling/thinking/acting, rather than primarily a literal interpretation of divine rules and strictures (i.e. dogmas are supposed to help us live beyond dogmas in the Love that is All).
Nobody’s faith means anything to any of us except to the degree that that faith helps us to live not our ideas and feelings about spiritual Love, but spiritual Love Itself. That’s why the spiritual life is primarily a poetic, rather than a literal journey.
I cannot help but roll around and around in my head some little line from the Heritage Foundation’s boss saying that the purpose of human life is not to be able to do whatever we want, but to be free to do what is right; and also the part where he said life is to be spent worshipping God. What is this guy talking about?!? Does he even hear himself? Of course, those things are true; but agreeing that they are true does not at all imply signing up for a super-strong Executive branch that uses its clout to silence dissent and force Christian dogmas into law.
No one is free to do anything except what is right. Because we are only ourselves to the degree we follow the Love that chooses everyone. And so we are only free to the degree we live in and through and for the Love that never lets anyone down. There’s no need to pretend that the state can force spiritual enlightenment on people. Everyone knows that they can only be meaningful to themselves to the degree they live in and through and for spiritual Love. And combining spiritual and political authority tends to corrupt both religious and public life by tempting everyone to lie to themselves and others about the most sacred things.
Furthermore, doing the right thing is the same as organizing one’s feeling, thinking, and acting around Pure Love, and flowing meaningfully off of Pure Love; and that’s the same as worshipping God. But how can the state force people to worship anything except power, fear, and conformity? In a liberal representative democracy people are free to do the right thing; most specifically: we are free to not be punished for doing the right thing. That is a miracle. That is a spiritual Good. Top-down forced spirituality leads to oppression and to everybody lying to themselves and everyone else about the most sacred things. We can monitor what our leaders say and do; we cannot monitor how well they relate to divine Love. Come on, dude!!!!
Be that as it may, we’ve still not resolved the central issues: What’s the wisdom meme that helps us all together preserve democracy and rejoice in the ability to share and to stand up for the universal values and the Love that animates, justifies, and explicates those values? And what kind of a Knight of Faith can help this time and place?
Hmmmm.
Author: Various Contributors
Editor: Also Many, call us Legion, or wait, maybe that didn’t come out right …
Managing Editor: Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown
Copyright: still Andy Watson, slipping out the back door, down the alley, disappearing into the hazy dusty sunshine, still a man working for you smile
