Claudius: “The deconstructionists always attempt to deconstruct everything but their tenured university jobs.”

Januarius: “One of the pointy heads recently said that school should teach an individual to be critical of everything. It’s the old luciferian inspired tool for stirring up dissatisfaction while plumping an individual’s pride. I would call it Critical Critical Theory. Though, of course one mustn’t ever be critical of the critics, or their programs, or their motives, or…”

Claudius: “‘Our dialectic is the critique of everything that is.’ (paraphrased, Karl Marx, who dedicated Das Kapital to Lucifer.) To be critical of everything one has to place oneself on the opposite side to God, Who created everything. It would be much better to marvel at everything that is and dedicate one’s life to know the truth about it. That eventually would lead us to know all that can be known about God. To be critical of everything that is can only lead to error and to know the mind of God’s enemy while dismissing the opportunity to know God’s mind. The woke deconstructionists are taking a saw to the branch they’re sitting on, selling their only mule to buy a plow (to multiply the aphorisms) … the now famous phrase of T.S. Eliot ‘The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse …’ Now I think the collapse is imminent, the godless experiment is collapsing all over the place.”

Januarius: “Indeed. Even science is turning on them. Acceptance of what is, is the beginning of humility, and by what is, I mean reality. According to tradition, Lucifer saw the incarnation and rebelled. It is echoed in the moment when Peter told Christ to fix it so he wouldn’t have to be tortured and killed and Christ said, ‘Get behind me Satan.’ It was echoed as well when Judas Iscariot objected to the anointing with precious oil, which tradition holds was the moment he decided to betray his master all the while virtue signaling about the poor. The two things that the rebels most violently deny are: the existence of sin and free will. Given an acceptance of those two items, it is immediately apparent that no utopia is possible, ever, and that the Cross must be the way. In their pride they believe that desire and disruption are all that is needed to manufacture heaven out of material resources. It is really quite an insane proposition when one considers it. One wishes to ask the dreamers, ‘have you ever met an actual human being?'”

Claudius: You said, dear Januarius; “Acceptance of what is, is the beginning of humility, and by what is, I mean reality.”
Once I was trying to show someone how to play Bossa Nova. She mastered the chords quite handily but the next time we met, she asked why her “sound” of her was not the same as mine. We sat down and she produced a guitar. I asked her to play the tune (Tom Jobim’s, Garota de Ipanema) and she did. There I noticed I had neglected to show her something. When most Brazilians play anything in the guitar, the player marks the rhythm on the strings with the tips of his fingers. It is an instinctive thing that I had never noticed before. You won’t find it written anywhere but it is essential to the sound. May be the first to do it was Joao Gilberto and it was picked up by other guitar players of his generation. I doubt it was a conscious move at all. We all picked it up by instinct (?) Then, Roger Penrose says “understanding is not computational activity” which fits perfectly with what happened to my friend right after that. She could not “fit” that pulsation of the fingers with the “picture” of Girl From Ipanema that she had formed in her mind. You see, she had to think her left hand action: [now I press the string] + [now I let it go] … In her mind she could perfectly remember the elements of the musical notation but she could not translate the rhythm to the tips of her left fingers. Yet, any kid learning guitar in Sao Paulo picks that pulsation up without even being told. My friend’s is the material approach to learning Bossa Nova. One can be a pretty decent classical player with the material/technical approach but anything else (Bossa Nova, Jazz, Blues or anything) will sound hollow because there are components to those ‘languages’ of music that seem to come from the quantic realm –to put it that way– There are things that are not merely computational, they come from somewhere else. McCartney’s Dear Boy and 16 Tons share a similar structure and so do Manteca and I Want You (She’s So Heavy). One’s sense of discovery of such similarities comes with practice but ultimately emerges from some sort of instinct. I don’t think one could program a computer to detect the similarities, perhaps one could but most people confronted with those facts will not find meaningful similarities. Trying to better the universe with the present human skills is something akin to that. Nothing can be built on matter alone. The most man can do using only matter is some kind of abomination.

Januarius:  “Of course. And the latest thinking on the universe in physics is that every thing is information. It’s obvious when considering DNA,  a code sequence, but it applies equally to the quantum state. Position and velocity are pieces of information. At the quantum scale all there is is information because material causes don’t work – or so the thinking goes (very badly presented by me here). So the Enlightenment of cue ball causes (material causation) is walking dead – soon to collapse as word gets around. Physics thinks in terms of eight dimensions and in one dimensional state all of history (past, present and future) are/is – bad way of saying co-existent. You and I call that “eternity” or the spiritual realm. But wait! There’s more! Information requires mind and its corollary consciousness. Science is knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door and the poor dumb reductionist materialist Darwinians are on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of science and the wrong side of everything else. Very few are observant enough to begin to have the fluttering of panic. The rest of the mob can’t hear themselves think because they are screaming too loudly. ”

Claudius:  This conversation agrees with what your just said. Have you seen this video? Believe it is worth hearing the whole 60 minutes. Truly worth hearing. I’ll wait for your comments.

Januarius:  I came, I watched, I agreed. Many years ago, I complained about Jordan Peterson. He was quoted as saying something that was purposely edited to be unpalatable. I had not heard the comments in context. Since that time, I have followed him closely. I watched his daughter give updates when he seemed to be close to dying. He speaks of and by and through truth. His political opponents (some of whom pretend to be philosophical opponents, but who make their points politically and by name calling and motivation assigning) speak of lies, by lies and through lies. The professor he described who had built a four million dollar “green” house, had one kid, etc. was virtue signaling and celebrating his own good works having only one child in an expensive earth friendly house. That one was the absolute modern embodiment of a Pharisee. A whited sepulcher, shining white on the outside, but filled with corruption and dead bones. When I encounter a story of an individual who has arranged his entire life around his comforts, and then lords that over the rest of us as if his self satisfaction was virtue to be emulated, I realize we have come full circle to find the type of pride that started this conversation.  The greatest argument for the existence of hell may well be that humans will bring it forth in this world. The spirit of that will is not, by any definition, material. If that spirit survives material dissolution, then guess what…? It is the will that has rebelled. Anyone who believes in God must believe in something that is immaterial — we call it the soul. The choice for or against God is made in time. The consequences exist in an endless present we call eternity — wherein the ability to change choices no longer applies. And hell yes: if there is no God there is only compulsion, power and force. The left clearly believes that and has collectively made their choice. Last Sunday’s Gospel had Christ telling Peter and the fishers of men to lower the net on the right side of the boat. They had found nothing on the left side. In another reading the goats are on the left and the sheep are on the right. I am beginning to suspect the choice of handedness was not accidental. There is so much going on right now!  Those that have eyes to see and ears to hear are very aware of the battle. The self-satisfied (deaf and blind to the danger) will have to end up being satisfied with self when the bills come due. There will be no redemption from the guilt we all feel, yet which they ignored in their Pharisaic posturing.

Claudius: Agreed as well and I agree with what you responded. In the video, Peter Robinson wonders why all that woke nonsense has stormed Academia reproducing like a worldwide wildfire. I remember a similar thing happening in the late nineties. Back then, in an equally inexplicable manner, Human Resources (the then recently rebranded Personnel, notice persona downgraded to resource) took over the selection of tech personnel for say engineering projects and processes for which they were as prepared as the members of the English faculty to run universities. It was a pincers attack. Human Resources on one side, the newly created MBA’s on the other. So, if you wanted to head the Engineering department, your competence had to be determined by a generalist manager with no particular experience in a specific business (the MBA) and a crew member of the HR department. I remember when a well intentioned Boston HR young employee interviewed me for a job at Whatchamacallit Corp. (that was not the name) that was creating a combo similar to MS Office suitable to work over Internet. The poor lady asked me “Do you have Word?” and I did not understand she was talking about a word processor — She was using the HR jargon. She meant “have” as to be proficient, knowledgeable. It took a little back and forth for me to understand. Of course, she took that as evidence of my incompetence. The position involved the development of simple databases to store the software instructions, something I could do in my sleep. Word was the software used to write the technical docs, I had been using it for years at that time. Everyone lost but that lady at HR went home convinced that she had served the project outstandingly. I could tell you about a dozen anecdotes like that. The purpose of the MBA program, HR repurposing, woke English Lit, etc. is to serve as wedging tools to dismantle American competence. It is working fantastically well. We are in the hands of ignorant men and women, the latest post filled was the Presidency of the US, not to mention the Papacy.

The vacuum left by competence has to be filled by Phariseeism: Pharisees are technicians who can read the appearance of the sky but could not recognize the Messiah if he kicked them in the rear end. Notice that one of their duties consists not only in not seeing the Messiah. They were also trained to kill him if he dared to appear. Competence and moral integrity are similarly turned into enemies and the appearance of competence and moral integrity (posturing, virtue signaling) reign supreme. That absence of true virtue and competence show clearly the underlying absence of truth. What place is completely devoid of truth, virtue, etc.? That place is Hell. The absence of truth requires the absence of reason which is the light of human intellect “connecting” with Logos, with the divine intelligence that gave us Creation. To expel reason, the infernal forces use force, social violence: “Write that gender diversity statement or be out of a job.”

Biblically there is nothing worth redeeming on the left side (of the boat or flock) while the inhabitants of Nineveh are described as “people that do not know their right hand from the left.” The Hebrews (and other peoples of the ancient Middle East) reserved the left hand for toilet purposes while the right hand was exclusively used for fetching food from the table and take it to the mouth. Think of that: one side handles what is to be disposed of; the other handles the food necessary to sustain life and for communion meals with one’s people. You are right when you say: “I am beginning to suspect the choice of handedness was not accidental.” The spiritual reflection of that handedness business is in the I/thou duality. God is in ‘the Other’ while the demanding I/me/mine is the seat of sin; for the time being. The wounded I is an erroneous reflection of the One Who is the ultimate Thou. If the woke blind follows the woke blind both will fall into a pit. That pit is the condition we call Hell. Now, the necessary condition to manage universities, corporations, governments is that kind of blindness. Now you know where those institutions are going.

Januarius: In a handbasket!