Conflicting Perspectives Aren't Always Bad, they Triangulate the Target - LOTR 77
Note: I seem to be missing post 76. But the Fourth of July is tomorrow, so I am resuming these emails. I’ve developed cataracts, and had to limit my screen time, until I get that “resolved”, as it’s burdensome to do computer work. But there’s a backlog of posts from Cassiodorus that could go out. Recommended: William Hunter Duncan’s substack. The LOTR posts are poetic and “all over the map” - let’s just say, I’m trying to “say it, without directly saying it”. It’s not just the death of a country, a culture, or a nation - it’s the death of a civilization. But just because “the current West” is doomed, doesn’t mean we have to be. We can build it back, better, & the way we want it. We should use the “older West” as a model. Life will go on, no matter how crazy things get, including “extinction level events”, which are entirely possible. I’m trying to live my life as if, no matter how “small and hobbity” it is, it might regenerate or “save” the rest of it. Because that’s how things “actually are” to begin with. That’s the meaning of, “One Life to Live, and After That, The Judgement”.
By the time battle tested hobbits finish the Ring Quest, & return to the Shire, they are no longer slaves of the Zeitgeist, exposed to winds of competing doctrine, vulnerable to the shifting sands of Father Time or Mother Earth. But we don't make grandiose, narcissistic prophecy here at The Squire. We leave that to the likes of Sam Altman and the rest of the "world" (eg., Yuhal Harari, etc.). That way, madness & nincompoopery lie (we will stick to ecbatic prophecy, thank you!). People who are allergic to Reality, reveal that they are frightened of themselves. Reality-averse = Not-comfortable-inside-your-own-skin. You have to wonder, what is going on inside? A little? Don't you?
Hence, it is good to be "based". Individuation ain't easy, but that's what it means to be human. You can choose to Prick Against the Goads. You can choose to hate it. But you will learn, the easy way or the hard way. Don't Kill Them! They Won't Learn Nuthin'! The hobbits, by the time they leave Gondor, are well and truly "based". And they still have their sense of humor.
Welcome to the Finale.
Dante put Orosius in one of the Divine Circles of Paradise, because through the liberal art of history (along with the grammarian Donatus), he had attained to living wisdom. Therefore, there is a portal through careful study of both history and grammar, taking baby steps, because small things (like us hobbits) are important, and lead to bigger things (like drinking the ent draughts).
Any Prophecy made here is ecbatic. That is to say, it is somewhere between secular "history" and actual predictive prophecy. Here is one for you - we are not at the Beginning of the End, but just the End of the Beginning. The Deep State has been dealt a vicious blow, and the floodgates are opened up. We don't know how it will all go on, or end up, but like Day One of the battle of Gettysburg, the leading columns of each army have now encountered each other, and are coming onto line. Battle is joined. Disengaging and retreating, to fight another day, will be hard to do for either side, without enormous casualties.
At stake, is whether the nations of the West intend to govern themselves as a commonwealth, anymore, or even govern themselves at all, & if the modern nation state will survive. And we know who the enemy is, on the prime material plane. Although it's always possible to focus the view a bit...
DT has no possible motivation to hold back versus these involuted spiritual midgets:
There is potential for him to make sweeping changes because he has nothing left to lose: it’s his final term, he’s old and already a billionaire, he’s been demonized to the extreme and his reputation already tarnished by the Democrats, which includes tangible arrests and felonies; on top of all that, he has the full mandate of the people with the popular vote and what looks like a total unprecedented control of every branch of government with a full Red sweep. This is a trifecta, a historically rare moment where he can go all out and generationally cripple the deep state while reforming the entire system—hell, he can even outright descend into full-on Caesarism if he wanted to, but that’s another story. At the minimum, he can mimic Milei in extirpating all the needless overgrown weeds of governmental agencies.
In fact, quite the opposite. It's full speed ahead with "let the smart people fix this". We are entering the Age of Caesars, and changing our elite from managers, to entrepreneurs.
Enjoyer, not even Marxists believe that the proletariat will become the emergent ruling class, though they pretend to; they believe that they themselves are destined to become the nomenklatura that tells the proletariat what to do. That is to say, Marxism is an ideology of the managerial class, which is now in charge and is in the process of sunsetting out. The next rising elite is pretty clearly the entrepreneurial class, as typified by Trump and Elon Musk — charismatic personalities that figure out ways to profit from a civilization that’s well past its peak. Enjoyer, it depends on how far we slide down the slope this time around. An elite usually lasts for about a lifetime — the managerial elite came in with the Second World War, replacing the capitalist elite that came in with the Civil War — so this one might reasonably last until 2100 or so. If decline follows the usual pace, industrial civilization will last longer than that, so the entrepreneurial elite may have the chance to rise and fall before it’s replaced by something else. As for reconciling philosophies, I’ll certainly consider that for a future post. Link
Now, of course, The Shire is a spiritual reality, so we really aren't ultimately depending on politics to secure the Spirit. Please read St. Maximus on the Logos and the Logoi, for all of that. Or Erigena. Or Caussade. But we live in the world, and this kind of stuff happens, all the time. Only in America, was it possible to begin to forget that History Happens:
Nations and Empires (especially) will try to pull fast ones...where is Byzantium now?
Here is another future failed project of Modernity: What is The Line, the 170km-long mirrored metropolis Saudi Arabia is building in the desert? (theconversation.com) Can you imagine what the cooling bill is going to be on this monster?
When you lose your collective mind (and it tends to happen), you go berserk on the horizontal plane, "running amok" or being "feral", and/or just building Ozymandias pyramids in the middle of nowhere.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Link
Who can doubt that the "Deep State" was presiding over a dysfunctional and fuctionally-insane vision of Humanity, in which Totalitarianism (in this case, "The Granny State") had the last word, forever? All in all, you were going to be Another Brick in the Wall.
The "Deep State" reminds me a little bit of Japan's Imperial "Co-Prosperity Sphere"
Yet what comes next, is uncertain and not yet manifest. Here is one gentleman's vision of a future Shire, devoid of vainglorious Idols detached from our humanity:
In the world I see, the West has rid itself entirely of its universalist pretensions. It no longer seeks to impose its values on the world, for it recognizes that what works for Westmen does not necessarily work for others; and while this does not bring peace, for there will always be friction with rivals, we are at least spared the guarantee of war and the infamy of tyrannical ideological bigotry. Likewise, the renewed West no longer assumes that its ways can be adopted by anyone who comes, and therefore does not pretend that it can continue itself with other peoples’ babies. Migration in this world is free and easy between compatible countries – North America, Australia, New Zealand, the British Isles, and Western and Northern Europe. It is exceedingly difficult and therefore rare from anywhere else: those who wish to resettle from incompatible civilizations must demonstrate to the satisfaction of the Westmen that they can internalize the West, not merely mouth a few slogans, memorize some historical facts, and master a language, but become Western to the depths of their souls ... a nearly impossible task, and deliberately so. This renewed West has ceased trying to be all things to all peoples, and therefore becoming nothing – the off-beige AirBnB of civilizations. It is rather focused on the further and higher development of what it has always been, bringing forth its own inner genius as by definition only it can do. It is a West that has stopped apologizing for itself, because it is no longer sorry for what it is. It is a West that is happy to let the Chinese build their glittering cities, glad that the Russians are erecting glorious Orthodox cathedrals of glowing green glass and golden domes, thrilled with wonder as crystalline mosques spring in the oasis metropoli of Arabia, for this West has ceased trying to hector them into aping it, and focused instead on rebuilding itself according to its own best nature, banishing the solitary ennui of suburban housing developments for Shires of half-timber homesteads surrounded by gardens and laughing children, and tearing down its blank-faced office towers to build shimmering chromium Rivendells whose soaring Gothic beauty is the envy of humanity.
What kind of Shire do we want? Because the rebuilding is happening Now. It is begun. It is always beginning. It will begin again, forever. The Fall or Ruin of our projects, blows away the smoke, and the challenges of our Time, clears away the mists.
I do not have a program for Hobbits, per se. It would be supercilious and elitist to offer a self-annointed vision of The Shire, from on high, to those who are doing the heavy lifting, the suffering, and the sacrificing. But I can supply them with weapons, logistics, & training. In short, I am happy to inform them that the Truth was always on our side, and that the new Elite will have to Hobbit "roots", so it's "OK" to be intelligent, and make use of much during the salvage operation, which will be going on for quite some time (500 years?).
Link "I am me, and my circumstances..." Ortega y Gassett - existential Hobbitism
Ortega y Gassett may be a philosopher for our time, the time of the hour of the Hobbits. I wouldn't say (with him) that man "has no nature", but what he is getting at is the property of choice. Man has the freedom to orient himself to The Transcendentals. The secret missing ingredient in getting there, putting your self into it. The Transcendentals don't ever go away or change, but men are more or less devoted to them. We're more motivated now, then we've been in some time.
Ortega y Gassett insisted that our real identity included our landscape (our circumstances). "I am me, and my circumstances." For decades, centuries, nay millenium, men in the West have been told that they can ignore their lying eyes, and embrace what the aristocrats and soi-dissant self-annointed betters tell them is "good for them". Most probably, this goes back to the days of Rome, when men were divided between latifundia slaves and more-or-less emancipated optimates. The trauma of feudal Dark Ages, while productive of high chivalry, did nothing to help Western men overcome their consciousness of class. It was always about the Economy, stupid, even during the Norman Conquest. Both the Marxists and the Optimates, share this in common. But if Ortega y Gassett is right, these revolutions and oppressions simply reflect the confusion in our own spiritual state. The Individual (which the West has long defended, and also attacked) is actually the union of "I" and "the circumstances". Think about that long enough, and you could see Burkean Conservatism coming into its own: it matters to the Hobbits, what happens to The Shire. There is no one, without the Other. We can defend our hearths and homes, with a pure conscience. The Shire is a spiritual commonwealth.
Ortega y Gassett emphasized that "Truth is One, but it has many facets". Truth is always refracted through the perspective and perception of an individual. This is not relativistic - when the perception is strong, and the devotion runs deep, you have the Four Horsemen of the Hobbacalypse, descend upon The Shire, to scour it of its Evil. Each one has a different perspective, but it is all the stronger in union and power, for that! There is no "class consciousness" (except that of devotion to The Transcendentals) between these Four!
We don't have to "possess Absolute Truth", in order to orbit Living Truth! Ortega y Gassett confirms this, and votes with the Hobbits. Those who seek God (and haven't found Him) are "ever before His face" (Psalm 105:4). What is this but, "Everything is Relative...to God"? Don't worry about having Absolute Truth, before you fight the Enemy!
Because this struggle for The Shire runs so deep, & has gone on so long, there is a growing conviction (in America) that destroying the idolatry of Class (and Ideology) is necessary to preserve the Good. No Elite can be so insulated, that it loses orientation to Reality. But they all do this, eventually. And it's preferable to fix that peacefully, by those who are in contact with "Deep Reality". It looks like the basis for that, is going to be the generic, working "Hobbit" who has had "adventures". Rather than "the People", it will be "the Folk", properly lead. Jefferson's Natural Aristoi? The Scouring of the Shire is going to turn out (and Ortega y Gassett would be proud) to be the diametrical opposite of The Revolt of the Masses.
Godspeed!
The Cuillins of Home Soon shall I see thy bright shores in the sunlight The heather of hills and the rising of morn The rolling grey sea-mist blows East in the morning To run the wild hills of the Cuillins of home. Far away seaward, thy green hills are lovely Where glide the hill waters all down to the sea They tumble at noontide Like snow wreaths in moonlight As those who, heart yearning, would yearn it to be. Far away seaward, my green land, my youth land Far away seaward, the Cuillins of home While here in my dreamtide I'm hearing hill waters The laughter of streams by the Cuillins of home. traditional, arranged by Archie Fisher © Kettle Music, PRS Link
