As Is The Feeling,
So Is The Result.
You can have a Fiat-Command economy, which does not last, and you can have a Hindu-Christian economy, which does last. You cannot have both.
One feels good for a time but never makes you happy. The other feels difficult for a time and makes you happy. You cannot have both.
The correlate of that truth in political philosophy is: you can have a security state or you can have a personhood state. You cannot have both.
Tuesday, Angelo Codevilla published a lengthy and compendious essay under title Revolution 2020. The essay comprises crucial data points for any having operations or planning responsibilities or interests.
Angelo’s essay strings together several separate essays, so to speak, but all around the theme of revolution that has sent 1776-1789 America into non-existence (Greek me on, non-being, different from Greek uk on, being not) and is going to produce its successor.
Operations concepts and history comprise most of Angelo’s essay. Operations expectations and planning concepts and needs commence in force at the section titled What If The Rulers Win?
Typically of his work, Codevilla’s view is political (force vectors) rather than partisan (party politics). I think his estimate of local and nation-wide political forces, no matter the outcome of the election, is accurate albeit insufficiently inclusive of allowance for paradoxical phenomena (the unexpected, black swan events, the touch of the transcendent).
His taxonomy of the forces at work — albeit sans the Providential — is accurate and thorough. Missing from Angelo’s analysis and prognosis, both, is the soteriological component.
The soteriological component is that which, as Angelo knows, our Framers considered the indispensable bonding agent for just society and peaceful nationhood: native human nature polished bright by spiritual exercise, what our Framers called morality derived from religion.
The soteriological component of force and life, and therefore of society, nation, and history, is personhood. In political philosophy, also, the soteriological component is personhood.
Sans the component of personhood in its analytical regime, political philosophy — and also so-called political science — is paralyzed, reduced to flopping about uselessly in a sea of sterile banalities. In such a condition, and regardless their aim, political philosophy or political science — the latter being a euphemism for manipulating persons and groups by conducting information operations (propaganda) against their own cognitive abilities — cannot achieve their aim.
A security state — secure for rulers, not ruled — must needs become an oppression state because it starts from willful ignorance of citizens’ personhood.
Recognition and respect of personhood, the soteriological component of life force, serves two functions:
- (1) strategically, it bears the seeds of intellectual and moral clarity,
- (2) tactically, it stonewalls and dismounts opposition.
Thus, personhood, native human nature polished bright by spiritual exercise, is the active ingredient of the bonding agent — Providence, Saving Grace — that produces just society and peaceful nationhood.
Everyone knows that morality holds society and nation together. Everyone knows that morality cannot be legislated, meaning, cannot be thrown into existence by command. Everyone knows that fiat cannot effect moral man or moral society. Everyone does not know that the substance of morality, and its operation in daily life, is recognition of and respect for the personhood of a human creature, even an apparently evil one.
Personhood is the nature of human kind, the substance and causality of religion, morality, and politics, and the treasure of society and country. Respect for personhood produces power to plan operations against troublemakers and execute those operations successfully. Personhood is the soteriological component capable of guiding political forces along the paths of expansion, happiness, and tranquility.
Fiat-Command postures definitionally do not respect the personhood of persons. Such postures are inherently non-self-sustaining in consequence. Fiat posture degrades power to plan and conduct operations. Economies derived from fiat-command policies and procedures are short-lived and brutal. No one mourns their and their perpetrators’ passing.
Fiat-Command postures are unnatural. No animals use them. Only human creatures shrouded in legacy beastly nature go into fiat-command mode. Going the fiat route in life is really, really stupid and really, really harmful, panoptically.
Military organization and operations are their own case. They require fiat-command posture for a definite, defined mission with a pre-known outcome: unconditional surrender by a troublemaker of their will to aggress.
Military organization and operations have limited purpose and, except in unusual and temporary circumstances, comprise persons who have volunteered for the role.
Unlike distributed authority and command, which generate satisfaction and fruitfulness in the hubbub of ordinary personal, group, and political activity, the military mission requires centralization and unity of authority and command applied narrowly, not society-wide, for an identifiable purpose, with an identifiable end-state — conclusion — and for as brief a duration as can be made to happen.
Hindu-Christian postures definitionally respect the personhood of persons. The reason is simple, if not always obvious: Hindu and Christian practice — and therefore theology — begin and end with recognition of God as all in all: Atma, Christ. The Infinite at home in the finite. Logos in the world but not of it. Corporeality is the end of the ways of God (Oetinger).
Inscrutability on mega-steroids.
Now, this is nonsense, scandal, to quote St. Paul quoting the common opinion of Greco-Roman society and much of classical Greek philosophy on the matter. Finitude and infinity do not intersect. They cannot. To even think they can is to abandon reason and tangible experience, both.
Yet, Hinduism and Christianity accept and embrace that very scandal, the inscrutability of God in human affairs. Hinduism and Christianity embrace, therefore — all importantly for political philosophy, political science, and economics large and small — the inscrutability of persons in their personhood.
A person’s status, alone and in chorus,
Is the inalienability of their inscrutable divinity.
Socialist (Communist and Fascist) and Mohammedan thought and action drive towards eliminating inscrutability from all manner of affairs, private and public, domestic and divine. Socialists and Mohammedans make fiat-command economies. Their epistemological frames of reference, their ideologies, require it. Socialists abhor the thought of divinity. Mohammedans abhor the thought of an imminence and/or immanence of divinity.
- Stalin was a divinity student, by the way.
Socialists and Jihadis have affinity for one another on this basis. Neither frame of reference, neither epistemological-analytical regime, recognizes much less respects persons. The personhood of a citizen, their interior glory, reflecting the divine center which each is identically, even though differing in appearance, activity, and karmic load (destiny), Socialists and Jihadis / Mohammedans abominate.
If you would eliminate inscrutability,
you must despise and deny personhood.
- Modernly, it appears that a salient difference between Socialists and Mohammedans is that, whereas Socialists regard light-skinned males as not fully human and therefore enslaveable and killable, Mohammedans regard females per se in those terms. Neither Socialists nor Mohammedans beholds a human creature in their native divinity and therefore inscrutable personhood.
The theological core of successful, humane political philosophy is the Atma / Adwaitha observance in Hinduism and the Christ / Logos observance in Christianity. These observances, alone, give happiness to persons, groups, and nations by binding them to the personhood — which is the divinity — of persons, citizens, each and all of them. This binding effect of — say it plainly — love, throws persons, groups, and nations into the numberless felicities that build out and up from expansive economies.
Of such did our Framers observe when urging
upon all and forever most earnestly
morality derived from religion.
Ob Sie Christum Treiben is how Luther puts it: that which deals with, concentrates on, or drives toward Christ. Christ / Atma, is the center point, point zero, the origin, the home, identically, of each and every person. The love of truth as persons bestows on persons, groups, and nations felicitous economies.
If you do not love truth, you cannot be happy, and you sure as shootin’ can’t build an economy that lasts or is economical.
Americans make a personhood state. Americans do not tolerate a security state.
An individual has many experiences in the waking state and other distinct experiences in the dream-state. In the latter state, one creates everything one experiences – feelings, pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. In the deep-sleep state one is oblivious to everything worldly or imaginary, and becomes one with Primary Consciousness. Thus, under three different circumstances, the same person has three different types of experiences. Experiences may vary but the Transcendental Being within is eternal and not subject to any change. A garland drawn on a piece of paper will never move, shake, or wobble with respect to the paper. The paper itself might get tossed violently by gusts of wind but the garland would always remain firm on the paper and not undergo any relative movement. Likewise, although the external circumstances and the thoughts of an individual may undergo changes, the Divinity imprinted within will ever remain steady, constant, and never undergo any change. All aspirants must therefore cultivate clear vision and constancy of mind.
- Sathya Sai Baba – Summer Showers In Brindavan, May 18, 2000 / Daily Email, Sai Inspires: Subscription
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