What Are Blessings?

A Story

Several years ago, I heard a story about a Greek widow who had lost both of her teenage sons to tragic illnesses and now lived all alone. She spent many years by herself, stewing in her own misery, and it was at this point that her faith in God was largely broken and she felt great difficulty and unease. How could God take away her boys so young, before they ever got to live their lives..?


She heard of a hermit decades later and began visiting him regularly. She was aware that he could perform miracles and was a man of great wisdom, but he always told her that she should just have faith and not dig around too much for knowledge of God's providence. Finally, after many visits and many rebuffs, the monk assented to fulfill her wish and answer her question on why God allowed her sons to die...

As he prayed, she received a vision: it was of two young men, who were clearly her boys in her twenties, except the younger one was killing the older one with a knife. The younger one then went on to marry a girl the two had been fighting over, but then killed himself out of grief some months afterwards, unable to live with what he had done. The woman wept and was deeply moved, being restored to God, but also feeling like she had gotten more than what she had bargained for: she discovered her boys were not the angels that she had wished they were, and it was a great mercy that they were able to die while their innocence was still in tact, and that they could thus make it to heaven.

Blessings include things withheld

We should be thankful for what we have, and what we do not have.

Many people chase after money, fame, prestige, many sons, many daughters, and many other things that they believe will bring them happiness. Maybe it is even true that these things would have brought them happiness, but it could be at the cost of their own soul, or it could damage another person irreparably.

God's providence is not knowable, but you can be sure that He will provide to you what you deserve and what is proper for you.

Those who have been given much and handed prestige and fame have much expected of them, or they have received it not as a blessing, but as a curse. One look at the messy lives of celebrities shows that they are people just like us, and sometimes even people who have fallen further into darkness.

Believe it or not, you can be blessed with poverty. With mediocrity. With a normal job, a normal house, a normal everything. You can be blessed with infamy, or even shame, because if it is the shame that keeps you humble and allows for your spiritual growth, it was absolutely necessary for  you to endure it.

We are given nothing in vain, nor is something withheld without a reason.

Buying the Election & Gaming the People

One of the most important questions when it comes to Democracy is whether or not we are actually following the will of the people. Sometimes the will of the people can be obstructed through something like gerrymandering or some other systemic flaw, but perhaps the most poignant critique of all is the idea that the will of the people is so easily manipulated. It can be bought, lied to, manipulated, or manufactured.

The American election has given us a reason currently to ask this with the runaway success of candidate Bloomberg. Without many public appearances and just through his billions and media connections, the guy is having an enormous impact.

An impact that appears to be proportional to his spending:

Some of the other candidates are concerned and put off:

“Tomorrow night, for the first time, you’re going to be on a debate stage with the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, perhaps you’ve heard this. Two polls out today show that he’s your closest competition,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said. “Right now, do you see him as the biggest threat to you, to getting the nomination?”

“This is what I do know and this I feel very strongly about,” Sanders said. “You know, Mr. Bloomberg has every right in the world to run for president of the United States. He’s an American citizen. But I don’t think he has the right to buy this election. … I think it’s a bit obscene that we have somebody who, by the way, chose not to contest in Iowa, in Nevada, in South Carolina, in New Hampshire where all of the candidates – we did town meetings, we were talking to thousands and thousands of people, working hard – he said, ‘I don’t have to do that. I’m worth $60 billion. I have more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans. I’ll buy the presidency.’ That offends me very much.”

Moments later, Sanders was asked by an audience member, “If nominated, would you accept help from billionaires like Bloomberg and if not, why throw away something that can make a huge difference in winning 2020?”

Sanders repeatedly refused to answer the question.

The Daily Wire 

If it is the case that the American people can so easily be influenced and guided in the polls through message crafting and advertisements, we have a lot more problems than just this one time showing of Bloomberg. It means that many of our elections have solely been determined by the people who got out the most clever messaging to the most people.

It means that maybe even "Russian trolls" are capable of diabolically influencing the average American voter.

Traditionally, my response to the accusation of trolls winning the election has been one that is very much in good faith with the spirit of democracy: American people are able to see through lies and, moreover, the candidate that wins the election is the one that appeals most successfully to the will of the people by addressing their concerns and coming up with plans that they believe will positively benefit their life.

So, in a sense, there can be no meddling. Democracy is not open to meddling in the sense of being won through "trolling" or shallow advertisements because it is the people coming together to reach a consensus. The only meddling there ever could be would have to be direct.

The position of the Democrats appears to be one that suggests that the American people can and are manipulated, consent is totally manufactured, and the election is not about the consensus but about gaming the people. Politics becomes a game of deceiving good people.

In a sense, this is denying the agency of the people. It leads us to only one conclusion: Americans are easily fooled. This undermines the very basis of democracy -- if the electorate can be swindled so easily, why even have elections? Why have what really matters in the long-run determined by the fickle and malleable crowd?

People who advance these arguments do not actually believe in democracy but at the same time they accuse President Trump and the Russians of "undermining democracy."

Do we really have to believe that elections are really about charlatans practicing demagoguery? Does it all really not matter? Do we really have no foundation? Can we construct a system which would actually represent the people's will...? Do the people even have something that we can point to and indicate is their will..?

It's our duty not to our partisan politics, but to truth, to try to answer whether or not it is the case that our democracy is fundamentally invalid.

The Truth is In Between 

It is hard to say that the average American voter has no idea what they are doing. It's overly cynical and makes the average man, who we are all fighting and working for, seem incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, and he comes off as a complete rube. There's something utterly nihilistic and against the Christian spirit to suggest that people are incapable of knowing the truth.

Yet, it is ridiculous to suggest that people cannot be fooled, or that people cannot be manipulated into a completely disagreeable state. For we do know that there have been regimes that have practiced evil with a startling amount of consent from huge parts of the populace, and we also know that there were cultures that practiced cannibalism and torture as if it was a normal, everyday part of life.

A healthy, educated populace that have a media actively trying to report the truth objectively, without spin, and who is open to dissent in its editorials and hasn't created a complex system of sacred cows by which they manipulate and dazzle the people can be expected to be a good electorate. These are people that won't be "gamed" or "bought," because they are interested in patiently hearing the candidates out, discovering the reality, and voting based on their principles but not based on prejudices and unproven absolutes that they are goaded to believe by overzealous personalities in the media.

We can actually achieve something like an organic community where man is not being relentlessly manipulated by the managerial class, and where man is free to come to his own conclusions which would then be reflected in an electoral process.

Yet, it seems to be that these circumstances are rare, and this is not due to the shortcomings of the people at the bottom, but because of the lust for power of the people at the top.

It is easy to then say that the truth really is in between with man, and even in the best of circumstances, there will be people who are being manipulated and lead around. This will either be due to their personal fault  (a lack of real interest or education), systematic failures of the government or media to do their job, or even from manipulation of the managerial classes.

Nobles, Elders, & Bishops to Guard Them

Every system needs a series of checks and balances. We should always have votes, of course, because it is important for the will of the people to be known to some degree, but we should also be weary of the fact that naked democracy does turn into mob rule, and that people are entirely capable of being manipulated. 

In the current American system, the checks and balances are the government being a balance on themselves, and perhaps the unspoken check of the 2nd amendment. There is no apparent check on the media and the machinations of billionaires and the mercantile class, and with the religious institutions becoming increasingly powerless, it appears that only libertine impulses have taken over among the people. 

The fact of the matter is that we need a more dynamic system that has more factors in play, ensuring greater stability and safeguarding the people not just from the government, but from a media and culture that is dominated by money and one-sided ideas, all originating in NYC or LA.

What ultimately is required is a system in which there are static forces to offset the massive cultural shifts, and this can actually come in the form of strengthened religion and cultural institutions -- namely, cultural institutions that act independent of those which are designed solely for monetary gain and cheap entertainment. In short, we need more active participation in our society by our elders and our Bishops, and it would behoove us to have a class of ennobled people that served as cultural icons of greater importance than celebrities. 

We should not be under the illusion that all of nobility was always noble, but we should remember that strict codes of honor being regularly enforced are vital to the well-being of the national spirit. 

Since we do not have these things, our culture boils and spills over, and the rights that our Constitution guaranteed us are under threat. The electorate is in a bad position to making serious decisions because it is hopelessly partisan and often voting for either their won direct financial benefit, or they are under the influence of a culture of nihilism and libertinism that should have no role in how any society is governed. 

This is certainly a low point for democracy, and even though it can be said that our electorate continues to have plenty of healthy actors in it, we are not in an enviable position at all. 

I will try to write more on the theme of democracy and culture through the course of the election and try to unpack these problems more. 

Hyperreality & Bigotry

The first time that I can remember running across the word 'bigot' I was in my early teens. I cannot remember the definition exactly, but it was something along the lines of the very most common one:

a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own

WordNet via Wordnik 

Bigot has become one of the most common words used these days, and rarely does it actually refer to someone who is prejudiced (holding unreasonable preconceived judgments or convictions - American Heritage) or one who is intolerant (Unwilling to tolerate differences in opinions, practices, or beliefs, especially religious beliefs - American Heritage), but it is almost always the opening salvo in a discussion toward somebody who holds socially conservative views.

If we are unfortunate to be discussing something in real life, these words are uttered even before the argument is presented.

My absolute favorite aspect of all of this is what I call the argumentum ad bigotum. in which the person will say even though you may not be racist/sexist/homophobe for thinking this because you have nuanced beliefs, the majority of people who DO think this way ARE bigots, as if this sheds any light on the situation instead of further muddying the waters.

We all know that the true test of your honesty and commitment to a position is if it will work n reverse... If I were to tell a "Democratic Socialist" that, while their positions and arguments may be valid, the majority of people who have them are simply the terminally lazy and jealous types who only think & vote that way because of their vices. Why, if I made such an argument, I might even be called a... BIGOT.

Yet it is possible for somebody to unironically insist that holding onto certain beliefs means that you (or at least everybody else besides you who is in your camp) is prejudiced and intolerant. The hypocrisy of such a position is often lost on people: they throw the blanket accusation of bigotry on entire groups of people because of their memories of select people and, what is more interesting to me, the false memories and narratives given to them by TV.

Jean Baudrillard referred to this concept as hyperreality. 

In our culture, Baudrillard argues that we take ‘maps’ of reality television and film as more real than our actual lives. These simulacra or hyperreal copies precede our lives, such that our television friends may seem more ‘alive’ to us than the real person playing that character. He also began studying how media affected our perception of reality and the world. Here he found that in a post-modern media-laden society we encounter “the death of the real”, where one lives in a hyperreal realm by connecting more and more deeply with things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games or Disneyland, things that have come to simulate reality. He argues that in a post-modern culture dominated by TV, films, the Internet and media all that exists are simulations of reality, which aren’t any more or less ‘real’ than the reality they simulate.

Enter Hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard, creator of the concept of hyperreality

People's new concept of right and wrong are very much formed by the messages that they interface with on television, and I believe it is as this point that they use the tidbits they come across in their daily lives to bolster the ideas that they have received from TV. We cannot blame anyone for this -- it is something that we all do. We all suffer from a sort of confirmation bias, but now the bias is working in a funny way: instead of actively criticizing what we see on TV or the Internet, we are more likely to accept the truth we get from the TV & Internet (which very much constitutes hyperreality in the way that I wish to talk about it) and we actually begin to reject reality.

Reality plays second fiddle to the digital world. This is not so much because we have actually prioritized the digital above real interactions, but it is because we spend so much time with the digital, and the time that we spend with flesh & blood reality is far more clearly interlaced with digital culture than it is with the unfiltered and naked realities that we share with other humans.

I think it may even be true for many people here that the cumulative amount of words that they communicate to people via text on digital screens or across other digital mediums over a week is actually greater than the amount of communications that they have in reality.

TV & Infotainment, the Directors of Hyperreality

TV (and this can refer to Netflix) and film have taught us that Southerners are racists, alpha male types are sexists, Christians are bigots and narrow-minded, and that those who have faced prejudice toward their sexual inclination are all angels on the receiving end of the late 20th century's greatest injustices. Of course, TV et al allows these tropes to be broken: if the Southerner is, in fact, allied against all of the paper tiger racists that the TV show has created, and if it is the one Christian in the episode who has a modicum of nuance or, far more likely, is presented as somebody with a mega-meta analysis in which Christian concepts of morality are actually thrown out the window.

The news & infotainment industries also back this up in their own quaint way by focusing on the very same issues that are usually important to TV-world. They are eager to report on any kind of incident of racism, sexism, or homophobia because it feeds directly into the themes that they want to use to mold the opinions of the country, but will ignore far more impactful news that actually deals with death, huge sums of money, or emerging legal precedents. To be entirely fair, this is not something that the media is doing solely to practice narrative crafting: they also do it because it is these types of silly stories that involve race, gender, or sexuality that end up being the focal points of far greater ideological discussions. But let us remember: the stories that are picked are carefully curated, and they are meant to serve the point.

There is a reason why Michael Brown was a lot bigger story than Micah Xavier Jones.

Of course, as stated above, hyperreality does include exceptions. The media is not entirely "black & white," but let us not pretend that the existence of some amount of gray area actually means that the industry, as a whole, is telling an unbiased and respectable story. For it is the exceptions that are always used not to break the rule and render it irrelevant, but to prove the rule. Nearly all men are born with two functioning eyes. The men who are born without two functioning eyes are anomalous, and they are viewed as having some sort of extenuating circumstance. Thus the alpha-male who is not a sexist on TV is an exception that validates the trope: he would not be a friendly character with a name and a role to play if he was like the others.

The only time that people use the exception to break a rule is when they are trying to argue against you. In reality, we all understand this concept: we simply choose to ignore it when it suits us. 

It is because of this that we can say that everything is actually set up in a way to promote a unified truth of everything. There is the Light and the Dark, and the Gray are the ones that exist as plot tools to either write a story of them coming to the light or going to the dark. 

Hyperreality & NPCs

Hyperreality ultimately fuels bigotry by creating narratives consumed by the masses, and the masses then go into the world and act upon these realities. The broadcasters, more than anyone else, shape hyperreality, and so it is the media and infotainment industry as a whole which feed the people their world view.

This is why the NPC meme hit home so well: it implied that there are loads of people that do not think for themselves but actually function as Non-Player Characters. One could state, simply, that an NPC is programmed -- they are somebody who functions only in terms of the hyperreality that is dictated to them, and they come off as impervious to change, unreachable, robotic.

There is also something pathetic about the way that they will even bring out the tropes from their TV shows when discussing things. They are Dumbledore's Army; they are Jedi Knights; we are followers of Sauron  and if you don't know it, my sweet summer child, you are in for a rude awakening.

The world is now understood in a way that has been programmed. The mind is full of fake characters and fake memories that create tropes and themes which people believe play out constantly in the real world. People no longer deal with one another as people, but deal with them as if they are characters from a TV show who are symbols and stand-ins for some kind of ultimate reality being fed to them by media.

Hyperreality itself creates a system of bigotry: everybody becomes biased, prejudiced, indoctrinated, and unwilling to change. They also become unreachable.

Can the word "bigotry" have meaning when it comes from people who are slavishly devoted to a media-driven narrative of the world?

Can the word "bigotry" ever have any meaning when it is said without thought for whether or not the person is actually displaying an actual ignorance of the topic and a manifested intolerance for the object of criticism?

In hyperreality, these things do not need to be thought about anymore. People believe that they saw it all on a TV show or in a movie; they read the article about the man who called the police on a black man for wanting to use a Starbucks bathroom. They watched the movie about Matthew Shepherd.

It'll never actually matter to them what you think. The important truths have already been decided on the screens that they look at. Even if you aren't a bigot, the characters like you on TV are bigots, and that is enough of an argument against you to dismiss anything you could say.

Maybe you're not a bigot -- but if you were on TV, you would be. Case closed.

Mystery's Critique of Logic

Two decades ago, I remember Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and being taken aback by the way that the author referred to there being great mysteries of the faith. As a young man raised in a Protestant environment, this was not something I was familiar with: how is there mystery in the faith? What is the mystery? Isn't that which has been revealed a dispelling of mystery? It came off as being something that almost managed to hurt the faith: something which emphasized the faith in a way that is non-rational. I never thought it was more about emphasizing that which is beyond us -- beyond rationality itself.

I would later learn that the sacraments themselves are referred to as Holy Mysteries and that the word is used by Saints even describe the totality of the revealed truth as a mystery:

Just as soul and body combine to produce a human being, so practice of the virtues and contemplation together constitute a unique spiritual wisdom, and the Old and New Testaments together form a single mystery.

St. Maximus the Confessor, The Philokalia, Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue & Vice (Location 9206 on Kindle)

St. Maximus the Confessor

This knowledge very much rocked my perception of theology. At that time, I simply wrote it off as some romantic flourish of words and hadn't taken it fully in for what it meant. It didn't truly affect the way that I saw the world, and nothing had really changed inside of me.

Like virtually all Westerners, I had always felt that there should be no mysteries when it comes to the revealed truth. After all, it is truth, and I had always perceived the world (and my religion) as something that could be fully understood. One of the hallmarks of being a modern is living in a mystery-less world, after all. A world in which everything can be explained, and the levels on which it cannot be explained are so far deep into the issue that no normal person could possibly be that interested in it.

While I have no theology degree and I am definitely not equipped to speak with the knowledge of a theologian on the topic, it seems rather plain that when the Saints speak of the mysteries they are speaking about the revealed truths as they stand beyond the full comprehension and logic of man. This idea itself is a criticism and a rebuttal of Western modernity: it contests that some things are unknowable, revealed, and beyond us.

It is also in the concept of mystery that we find our first dispute with logic: logic is incomplete. 

By believing in mystery and revelation at all, the Christian has criticized logic and empiricism, and has cast doubt on the absolute certainty of the scientist's world. For we must remember, if logic and evidence are not enough to explain the totality of the universe (and as Christians we believe in the necessity of divine revelation), then any system which is based entirely on them is bound to be problematic for it cannot contain within it the totality of the truth. Any full acknowledgment of the truth must contain within it a genuflection to the great mysteries and revelations that are beyond the grasp of man.

In a very real sense, to try to overcome these things is like building the Tower of Babel: the attempt to supersede God by reaching the heavens ourselves. Yet, it is heaven alone that is accessible by God, just as the mysteries are accessible alone by God. This leads to a conclusion that does not sit well with people who believe that everything has an answer, we may just not have found it yet.

Moreover, logic is incomplete because it leads to deconstructions. Logic requires some form of value judgment to have a direction. And, even when a value is inserted, it is quite easy to come up with circumstances by which the values begin to deconstruct themselves...

For instance: Is a man who is a slave to his passions free when he indulges his passions? Is it logical for man to "fight for peace" when it is fighting itself that is the means to disrupt peace?

Even when we attach values that give us lofty assumptions about how the world should be, we see that logic only succeeds in twisting itself into contradictions. It is almost as if logic conspires against us by destroying the paradoxes which are necessary for understanding the world in a holistic manner, like the coward who is somehow courageous in admitting he is a coward (thank you, George R. R. Martin).

Logic gives birth to morbid dispositions that only mystery can fix. 

This might be the most interesting point I am going to try to make today.

When we believe that everything must be assessed on the short track of logic, then the suffering that we endure and the injustice of the world appear as a cruel joke that cannot be justified. The problem of evil becomes insurmountable because we are always cutting the cake in such a way where the passage through suffering does not produce edification, or where endured injustices does not produce glory but is simply an ugly moment that the guilty party and God ("if he exists") have to be held accountable for. In a godless world, there is no justice, there is no righteousness: there is only the suffering moment and the joyous moment, and the suffering always seems to hurt us more than the joy seems to heal us.

Logic ultimately produces a world where everything has to be reflective of the tyrannical demands of a man with a value and an ax to grind who is unwilling to admit that God could disagree with him. The man who remembers suffering and places it at the forefront of his mind and has already denied that a soul can advance spiritually, that suffering can have meaning, stands before everything shouting that it is all for naught.

The irony of this, of course, is that he may later in the day find himself in a discussion with another man where he agrees to disagree on value judgments or understands pragmatic decision making as acceptable, sacrificing a little A for a little B, but when it comes to God, no such flexibility is permitted. It can be good, in his world, to punish his daughter so that she learns to pick up her toys, and it can also be a good tale to hear about the man who became homeless from drug addiction but this homelessness saved him from his desires in the end..  Everything must conform to near-sighted human logic and tricks of language and structure, but only when he is in a certain mode with a certain attitude -- namely, only when he desires to be mad at God.

God has given us mysteries and the Old & New Testament themselves are to be understood as a mystery according to the Saints, but in the Western Christian mindset, everything is meant to be interpreted through a strict rationalism that deconstructs itself and everything with it.

This is quite reminiscent of the meme of the "Sword of Tactical Nihilism," in which the atheist wields strict, unforgiving, high-bar logic against that which he dislikes but does not do so against that which he likes.

The real lesson is, though, that logic itself usually functions as tactical nihilism, and many people are sucked into it because they feel that they are actually doing something because, in so many words, they hadn't crossed any wires that they can see.


Conclusion

While Stephen Pinker and others would argue that man engages in ego-protective reasoning, I would go a step further and say that all logic ultimately functions explicitly to serve the biases of the thinker, and that what liberates us from bias is when we understand the limitations of logic and no longer look to this as the final answer is mystery. For just as surely as we make mistakes that benefit ourselves whenever given the option, and just as surely as rules can be deconstructed as arbitrary when you look at it from another way, logic fails us.

But when we are open to mystery, when we are open to divine revelation, when we have faith that God is at the helm, we understand that the world is not subject to the  whims of despot with a dialectic, but is in the hands of our Father.