Switch to De-Caff, Denethor
Gandalf & Pippin have been in Gondor, while Merry is with King Theoden. And it’s not a minute too soon, either. The High Steward, Denethor, has been having some late-night-struggle-sessions with Mordor, replete with flickering lights & haggard visions of Mordor’s growing power. He’s got a death grip on that Palantir. It can’t lie to him, but it can sure show him stuff he doesn’t need to see.
Shades of Joe Biden, wrestling with the Teleprompter, or trying to handle a call from Vladimir on the red phone? Wafting, redolent decaying efflorescence, of Barack Obama’s promise to “change America”? Surreal and haunting reminiscences of Clinton and Lynch on the tarmac? A bouquet of memories from Klaus Schwab’s graduating class of 2022? It’s just hard to say, innit? Certainly, one can not really call the Progressive Party compos mentis. But then, who really is, these days? It certainly does seem to be a matter of some vast degree, however, with that crowd. Their Logic seems impeccable when pursuing a coherent thought, on paper or behind the podium. Everything seems to be working smoothly and functionally. They seem to be inquiring after Truth. It’s just that, they never get there, and they invariably make the worst decision they could. How do they do that? You could flip a coin, and be right way more often.
Our day uses economists instead of astrologers, but with this key difference: astrologers get more things right, even the non-traditional ones (H/T JMG). But in this case, Steward Denethor would have been better off being more like King Theoden, & abstaining from dabbling even with the Secret Fire. I will note that neither of them consulted an economist. Our politicians and “elite” love to dabble in Secret Fire and economics, since at least the time of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi. And there are a lot of “Elites” and “Experts” out there today - hordes of them, in fact. We are definitely at “Peak Elite”. Can Politics and Economics be considered a form of Black Magic? Maybe, even the pre-eminent form? Valentin Tomberg sure thought so. Anyway, there is a whole passel of Scalawags and Carpetbagging Elites/Experts, all with children that they want to get in on the same racket. There are just too many Chiefs and not enough Indians. Being Elite is not good for your soul. Because it takes your soul.
I had not thought that death had undone, so many. Source
L.M. Sacasas, in his substack letter Convivial Society: The Myth of the Machine, helps us understand (in this case, why are Denethor and the Progressives just so damned Crazy?).
It is possible to argue that they failed long ago, but the failure was veiled by an unevenly distributed wave of material abundance. Citizens became consumers and, by and large, made peace with the exchange. After all, if the machinery of government could run of its own accord, what was there left to do but enjoy the fruits of prosperity. But what if abundance was an unsustainable solution, either because it taxed the earth at too high a rate or because it was purchased at the cost of other values such as rootedness, meaningful work and involvement in civic life, abiding friendships, personal autonomy, and participation in rich communities of mutual care and support? Perhaps in the framing of that question, I’ve tipped my hand about what might be the path forward. At the heart of technological modernity there was the desire—sometimes veiled, often explicit—to overcome the human condition. The myth of the machine concealed an anti-human logic: if the problem is the failure of the human to conform to the pattern of the machine, then bend the human to the shape of the machine or eliminate the human altogether. The slogan of the one of the high-modernist world’s fairs of the 1930s comes to mind: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.” What is now being discovered in some quarters, however, is that the human is never quite eliminated, only diminished.
The Dark Satanic Mills : What have we wrought?
Ancient man was sure of his own evil, but even more, quite sure of the purity of his Ideals. Modern Man has no faith in his own “ideals”, but is absolutely sure of his own goodness. A dysfunctional but interesting combination of both, is found in Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. In no instance is the more typical one-sidedness true, than if we are discussing someone who is a successful expert, or an empowered elite.
Enter the Gray Champion. (Original Source) It is he (or she) whom we need when the Elite/Experts “go bad”.
Those pulling the strings know the jig is up. They’ve played the debt card to the hilt. It began to unravel in September 2019 when the repo market cracked. Everything since has been part of their exit strategy plan. They know the house of cards is about to come crashing down and are attempting to pull off a controlled demolition in which they retain their wealth, power, and control. Of course, their hubris will ultimately lead to their downfall, as the world is too complex, has too many variables to control, and their malevolent machinations will blow up in their faces and possibly blow up the entire world…I understand what they are trying to accomplish. With little food or fuel, and less than 1% of the population able to grow their own food to sustain themselves, the Build Back Better oligarchs expect the masses to beg them to be saved. This is where the WEF slogan, “You will own nothing and be happy” comes to fruition. You will be doled out a food ration, work menial jobs, live a squalid existence, use their global digital currency, and try to maintain a high social credit score so you are not ostracized and condemned to the gulag, or worse.
Aragorn, Gandalf, and Elrond are good Gray Champions. They hearken back to an earlier time, since Right and Wrong, Creation and Evil, do not change their essential Nature, although often they change their outward apparel.
Since America decided that “All of History is Just Economics”, I guess economic annihilation is now an acute matter of national survival. If we crash, then that’s the End. Maybe we should have had a deeper concept than mere Economics, of the whole of things. So that is the power of Mordor, placed within a Ring. Hope you have a backup Philosophy, ready to go.
The fact of the matter is you’ve got to look at what the Fed is doing, not what the Fed is saying. They have to talk tough. … It’s the opposite of the Teddy Roosevelt strategy. They don’t have a stick. They can’t really fight inflation. So, they have to talk tough as if they’re going to fight it, because they’re hoping their tough talk will do the fighting for them, and they won’t have to reveal the fact that they don’t really have a stick.”
Someone saw this coming back in 2011…
But what is happening today is something quite different. Although something of the old spirit of patronage remains, in the main the vast engines of culture have been turned from uplifting the citizen to degrading him. Indeed, the whole point of the exercise is to turn each of us from being a citizen into being a a pure consumer; that is, from being a person who takes responsibility for himself, his family, and his community, into being a person whose self-respect is invested only in what he buys, and who is directed only by unregulated and easily manipulated passions. We are told that the economy is regulated by “self-interest,” but this is a lie. Indeed, it cannot be so, since self-interest is never something known in advance, but rather something discovered by experience. Who among us has not had the experience of getting exactly what we wanted only to find that it wasn’t what we wanted at all? And who has not feared the worst, only to find that it was all for the best? No, self-interest is revealed to us, not known in advance. What we can know—and what advertising appeals to—is our desires. Desire can be converted to self-interest only when guided by the intelligence to good ends and disciplined by the virtues to good means. Intelligence and virtue: these are the enemies of any good marketing program. Modern advertising appeals not to our virtues but to our vices. And it has at its beck and call an incredible and bewildering array of technologies capable of intruding into every corner of our lives and our souls.
We plan on exiting through the wreckage, because History is not just Economics or Progress. See Lowith’s magisterial work.
The modern mind has not made up its mind whether it should be Christian or pagan, it sees with one eye of faith and one of reason. Hence its vision is necessarily dim in comparison with either Greek or biblical thinking.
Christianity always embraces the paradox: it’s both
One might argue, it can’t see at all that way. The two eyes have to see as One.
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. - Matthew 6:22
We can contemplate the exaltation of Sauron, the madness of Denethor, the perfidy of Saruman, precisely because these are but“ripples” on the surface of History. One can get both higher & lower - Higher into the clouds above the storm, and lower under the water’s storm on the surface.
…May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; - Ephesians 3:18
And one can, indeed, cultivate depth and height. Civilized men, used to do so. Remember Helm’s Deep and Dunharrow? The deeps, and the heights.
"So had it lasted," concludes the Wanderer, "so had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dew-drop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Death-song, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle's splendor), and thought that of this last Friend even I was not forsaken, that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing, could the Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured. "Full of such humor, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when, all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. "Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (das ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's);' to which my whole Me now made answer: 'I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!' Source
We have discussed this idea before - a Binary is given in revealed religion (Man vs. God), in order to cure the original flaw of Division (Binary). Only by “refusing the line” (a right angle to a right angle), is the original Unity restored, flowing in the right direction. But there are other binaries out there, that cannot cure the Duality of the Two in Man. After all, these people think they are “teaching the Truth”. And not a few among us will succumb to living by the sword.
An Everlasting No to Evil (redolent with the entire sum of the ending Era of Pisces in full fulfillment of the Cosmic Law), carried out at all levels of the individual, will place them beyond entrapment in the wreckage and confusion of what is coming. And Who is the Devil?
I am. Hence, a man must deny himself, in order to be free. I must.
The Ice Bridge to the Higher Realms
All of Tolkien’s work teaches this, & does more - it allures or entices to the Good, since the Good is free, and cannot be compelled. Denethor’s lunacy is the logical and ineluctable consequence of putting your faith in Man, no matter how wise. If an individual is wise (let’s say a “7”) but they think they are a “10”, then their wisdom will turn to madness. So don’t worry about where you rank - worry about who you really are, and think justly of that. This madness of God will make you wise and wiser, than your natural betters.
For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. - Romans 12:3
Hence, the wise policy of Gandalf, the Ringbearer, the forebearing Aragorn. Yet, (and Tolkien hints at this through the Eagles & Elves, and in other places) there is more. There is Good beyond Good, Truth beyond Truth, Beauty beyond Beauty. If there were not, then we would be stuck with sentimental and moralistic (and indeed tragic) Conservatism forever. The Hobbits could never enter a wider world of Divine Magic. Frodo could never take ship for the Western lands of Valinor. We need an infinite, Divine horizon, one which (although difficult to reach), is not impossible, since “with God, all things are possible”. We are the talking animals of Narnia. And Aslan is on the move. There is a White Magic, a Deeper Law, a highest Love, of God.
But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. - John 5:17
A friend of mine gave me a link, the same friend who inspired these posts by sharing “the Speech”. I am with the Leithart crowd on this one: the Spirit blows where it will, and it has not yet entered our mind what God has planned for those who love Him.
We hold fast. We refuse the temptation of Sauron. We endure. We will prevail, and more than prevail, though we should fail in the world’s eyes, and our own, for a little while. For us, at the dawn of the Aquarian Age, the age of Pisces must be fulfilled, every jot and tittle of it, and the new wine be put into new wineskins, and the torch passed from the ancestors, to those who will inherit the dawning age of Middle Earth. Nothing else matters, unless it be “more” of the same.
The world of the redeemed Fey?
Who are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you shall become a plain. And he shall bring forward the top stone amid shouts of “Grace, grace to it!” . . . Whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice. (Zechariah 4:7, 10)
Don’t despise the day of small things. It is the small things which will destroy Sauron. Can you feel it? God will call things which are nothing, something, and they start very small. But they will bring to nothing, the things that “are”.
So many times are ending at once.
Age of Pisces (origin of Axial Age Religions) - Global Precession of Zodiac (Astral)
Cultural Dominance of Europe in the Faustian Era - (Etheric)
America in her current form & the Diasporan Pax Americana - (Physical)
Undermining of Christianity - (Mental)
Explosion of Technology simultaneously with Exhaustion of Energy - (Spiritual)
So something is “up”. Stars will fall. Judgement will go down. A Sea Change is coming. Sauron will not survive, even if he “wins”.
Thesis - Sauron did win the War of the Rings. LOTR is what Middle Earth looked like with a Melkor/Sauron victory. Sure, it “would have gotten worse” - but how much worse could it have gotten, from a civilized perspective, than it actually did? At least in principle? Have you read the Silmarillion? Sauron did not lose - he won. Which destroyed the ring. Which destroyed Sauron. And all it took, was a mustard grain of Faith. And a desire to resist. “An old fool’s hope”.
Peak Lunacy: Denethor, the Mad
Your words, little heard and lesser heeded, shall seem prophetic in days to come