Remarks from Doug’s alter-ego, named
:
Why Me?
For an era of peace and prosperity, these are extremely troubled, dangerous times. We can all agree on that.
For at least 30 years I’ve been wanting to hide as a Christian white man, not because I’m guilty of any so-called privilege, but because the growing madding crowd (more recent) is making the world increasingly unfriendly. I even have a name for my particular cohort, WAC’M (White Anglo-Saxon Christian Men), or “Whack ‘em” if spelled phonetically.
(I link in the paragraph above to the original movie Far from the Maddening Crowd (1967) and its recent remake (2015) of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel because I want to suggest that women are completely in touch with today’s subject, which I am getting to, and have been since Adam and Eve left the Garden. Hardy was a Romantic, and this first successful novel, a romantic tragedy, portrays a beautiful woman with three completely different suitors. Such conflict forces her (being named Bathsheba) to assume different roles. Talk about a tight spot! Hardy’s tale is arresting and very sad, but somehow captures the joy of life. Go Julie Christie!
It’s not only Apollo v. Dionysus in Sexual Personae by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s certainly in the center ring.)
Of course, as Sun Tzu suggests, any “art of war” situation forces one to take on disguised faces to protect oneself. So, being a WAC’M constantly on the move, like a criminal fugitive, I’ve gradually come to sympathize quite strongly with pirates and the like.
As a result, knowing this, people are coming to me with increasing frequency saying, “Hey, Jiminy Cricket, Q, why are you such a wild & crazy pirate, Hellboy, Spartan, arch-villain, lone ranger, even, God forbid, confederate? A cracker who thinks he’s a brother. Don’t we have enough going on in this Looney Tunes nation already?”
Well, yes, we do. Yet I have my own reasons explained in the page below from Tim Keller’s God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life (2017). Dr. Keller is an awesome worldview expert, and we often refer to him in our pages. The selection below from God’s Wisdom is by far the most important offering I have for you today; an analysis of Proverbs 29:27: The righteous detest the dishonest; the wicked detest the upright. We’re all wayward sinners saved by grace alone. With the righteous and wicked both seeing themselves as righteous, and with a middle space between them, granted, it’s gotten me to thinking.
I will insist that we leave particular names, egos, and labels aside for a second, as does the buccaneer in the video above renting the slip for his sunken ship (and R.I.P. those poor, still-swinging pirates he passed in the harbor’s No Wake Zone):
Why is it that so many psychiatrists and counselors believe it’s not odd at all and, in fact, natural for humans to have multiple egos or personalities?
We all do it. We are constantly giving each other nicknames and stepping into different roles everyday – from son to boss to husband to customer to patient to parishioner to lover. Roles are often combined. The roles we assume are endless, and we shift instantly without thinking from one to the other.
Who is to say whose fault it is, the individual or society, whether these varying roles create conflicts or even quite serious “issues” that can destroy relationships? Especially, the more modern, wealthy, and urban human beings in “civilization” have become. We move fast, and time is always of the essence.
As an example, look at the curation of multiple personalities assumed over social and other media now. As an example of that example, one of my fellow PC board members fashions himself as a rebel, too. He is all about the Rebel Alliance like me. (It has nothing whatsoever ever to do with race, sex, gender, class, or religion, and everything to do with just being human.)
Indeed, it’s quite the rage to choose your sex and even to name yourself, which, sometimes being awkwardly ahead of the curve, I did years ago on several occasions. I was Daddy X in the 1990’s, and then began thinking about Q in the early 2000’s. The rapper, Daddy X, tried to steal the name around then, and, subsequently, late in the decade, unknown Q’s took make believe with the aid of both media extremes to a new level. Glad that’s apparently over.
Some further background: In college back in the Seventies I had a double for a couple of years. Friends frequently said they had spotted me around campus at various places and times, where I knew I hadn’t been then. Tough to be in two places at once unless a photon.
As a relevant aside, I would never mention the nicknames I’ve been given in mixed company. Most men can say that. (Generally, in contrast, women don’t do that to each other, or at least they don’t let it out too much in public.)
Since leaving school behind, others in airports and elsewhere have asked me if I’m Dan Reeves, the former NFL coach, or Steve Martin, the comedian. It’s a tough gig, always being so far ahead of the curve. But we must defend our territory, which is one of today’s main themes concerning playing great defense with much more aggressive offense.
So I ask you, does it suffice to say that “it’s just human nature” that roles are proliferating like hotcakes, and that America is this screwed up?
Perhaps, but I don’t think so. We can choose. We must or else.
With this in mind, today we will take a careful look at multiple personalities and relationships in our society because the national Wokeness epidemic is related to the idea of “intersectionalities” or multiple identities, making COVID look like the common cold. We need to get this situation under control before it gets us.
Make no mistake: Getting our identities and narratives straight (for lack of a better word) is a matter of national life or death.
More specifically, in this post we will take a closer look at this phenomenon and even identify the main culprit, the Bitch, who must be eliminated at all costs to fix the situation. Her name is Self-Referential Contradictions (SRC’s).
The Social Construction of Reality
Since at least January I’ve been studying identity and meaning confusion carefully by reading all books pictured below, among related others. From the bottom we start with problem definition and by the top, thankfully, we’ve moved well up the road toward a better view, solutions, and much happier future times!
In the words remaining here, I will explain myself in reference only to that foundational book at the bottom of the pile, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (SCR, 1966), a classic by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.
It’s a humble treatise of only 189 pages that looks like it was written for freshman or sophomore college students to read in introductory survey classes, when universities still attempted to transfer Western civilization’s knowledge to graduates. I have a feeling I read it at UNC in the 1970’s. The book is completely without guile, without the biased nonsense unavoidable in today’s rather nuts academic milieu.
Just in time, SCR published before the full-throttle onset of the late 1960’s, Love-In’s chaos. That’s about when Marxist dogma began its unholy alliance with certain postmodernist elements. At the time the social sciences still believed in truth, objectivity, reason, logic, and God-given human potential. In real liberal progress.
In any case, if you are a fan of worldview thinking, a shorter book with more practical worldview insights probably does not exist. It is chock full of insights from social science, philosophy, and theology accumulated over hundreds of years. Finally, if you have a desire to return to the glory days of college-time mind expansion in the quiet of the library, too, you’ll certainly enjoy it.
To comment briefly on The Social Construction of Reality (SCR) as it’s relevant to Self-Referential Contradictions (SRC’s), today’s other main topic, it says in the Introduction that worldview thinking is not that important to the average person in the social construction of reality. Surprise, regular people don’t need front-of-mind worldview to live well:
Theoretical thought, ‘ideas,’Weltanschauungen, are not that important in society . . . Although every society contains these phenomena, they are only part of the sum of what passes for ‘knowledge’ . . . To exaggerate the importance of theoretical thought in society and history is a natural failing of theorizers . . . the sociology of knowledge must first of all concern itself with what people ‘know’ as ‘reality’ in their everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives. In other words, commonsense ‘knowledge’ rather than ‘ideas’ must be the central focus . . . (page 15)
My own summary of the book’s theme is that it describes how each person has subjective and objective selves who take on increasing number of roles of growing complexity in each age as various civilizations develop. Human beings are the only living things to look subjectively outward and then objectively backward, in part, through the eyes of others, at themselves. What we have who does this is called consciousness, and that’s where other selves often come into play.
When this ability is combined with various roles taken on as dictated by the outside world (e.g., son, sibling, friend, spouse, father, co-worker, boss, church member, citizen, etc.), it can get very . . . very complicated. The Social Construction of Reality describes carefully how individuals reify and de-reify their individual and collective being through consciousness into an objectified society in the minds of individuals, thus creating, perpetuating, and recreating social reality. These group social realities change over time.
A critical point here for today: Social reality is always significantly determined by an ACTUAL reality: God (if any), the World, Others, and you. Berger and Luckmann portray truth as very real, though always discovered and processed through existing human constructs in consciousness.
The book describes circles of everyday regular people endowed with high ability and common sense, without the need any elite guidance whatsoever. Reality shapes ideas and roles, and human beings adjust accordingly.
Now, in my own defense, The Social Construction of Reality (SCR) recognizes that reality places the demands of many roles on almost everyone, and these roles are often in extreme conflict. Hello Sybil, Sigmund Freud, and his couch! In fact, it’s extremely easy for persons to become “traitors to themselves”:
This opens a Pandora’s box of ‘individualistic’ choices, which eventually become generalized regardless of whether one’s biographical course was determined by the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ choices. The ‘individualist’ emerges as a specific social type who has at least the potential to migrate between a number of available worlds and who has deliberately and awarely constructed a self out of the ‘material’ provided by a number of available identities. (page 152)
Thank you.
The rub is that reality forces a competition on human beings that reinforces one or a hierarchy of social realities, roles, and narratives against others over long periods of time and generations. Reality entails a strong dialectic aspect that human beings test and negotiate through their common sense and lives given their shared experience and language. (See the progression of all of Western philosophy.)
Berger and Luckmann suggest that social realities perform best with a singular or unified identity that’s also flexible, while being fundamentally consistent over time, that reduces natural chaos and increases flourishing and happiness. We hear the same themes from Peter Berger in his later sociological classics, Jordan Peterson today, and even Vivek Ramaswamy in our last PC post.
Moreover, the authors establish an extremely strong case for the religious who believe an agreed social construction that best fits truth might lead to best results, salvation, or an otherwise state of Godly bliss or oneness. And it certainly helps if these narratives develop out of normal experience to fit reality. True stories that actually happen, like once upon a time a man rode into a holy city on a donkey.
Whether blissful or just sensible, such unified personal narratives or stories are absolutely essential for personal and national survival.
Self-Referential Contradictions (SRC’s)
So, with self-justification clearly established, let’s get to eliminating the Bitch. She must go.
(I only refer to the feminine case here because the character, Ellen Ripley, in Aliens (1986) refers to her as the Bitch, and Sigourney Weaver, the actress playing the role, like Julie Christie, is one of my and American men’s all-time favorites. The Bitch does indeed incubate countless baby aliens, who are just as mean as Momma.)
Here is Alien’s most famous scene:
Get Away from Her You Bitch
Our acceptance as American citizens of mutually-exclusive, contradictory points of view at the same time explains many of America’s said pathologies:
We have State executives and bureaucratic elitists undermining the People who elected them; our large companies supporting Communist state autocracy abroad, censoring Americans at home, and disregarding our key institutions for profit disguised as charity; our educators claiming virtue by attacking truth and destroying memory of actual heroes and key national narratives; our “leaders” everywhere calling for racist, sexist, and defeatist actions to solve racial, gender, and poverty issues (that are not great in magnitude relative to history, though still needing elimination for the common good); and, finally, too many scientists are denying or canceling science, while claiming their own views as bedrock. (I made this quote up.)
Truth is true; we construct social reality together. Our language does and must refer to an actual reality. The 6,000 languages across the globe are not so much about logic, as clarity fixed on reality. Linguists agree that clarity is the key between humans. IMO, God gives us the ability to talk and know the truth. We can only get to good fantasy through truth’s gateway. All regular people with good common sense agree here. They can’t afford to detach from reality. They are the ones who construct language; elitists in academia merely give it rules and logic after the fact, while trying to claim credit. Some scientists do this, too, in discovering God’s work.
In other words, such geniuses like Kant and Hegel were simply telling us regular types what we were already doing without any need of their explanations.
When we use language that is nonsense, we distance ourselves from reality and truth, come apart, and decline, or in time fail completely. Reality will reduce us, and other, better social constructs will defeat us. Stronger human social constructs on the outside will outlast us. Today, the West has sufficient reserves in power and wealth to remain strong enough to disintegrate from within from a fixture on fantasy, an absence of morality, and the disintegration of character.
So, it’s SCR’s versus SRC’s. (Sufficiently confused, yet? You can do this.) That’s today’s theme.
The heart of the problem is illustrated in Praxis Circle’s last Road to Reason Circling post, The Wicked Witch and The Law of Non-Contradiction, recently published. Notice the list of violations of the LNC mentioned there. Here’s a simplified, smaller sample:
- Do not trust words.
- There is no truth.
- Absolutely no absolutes.
- No toleration of intolerance.
- All cultures are good but ours.
- All religions are valid but ours.
- “Do your own thing”: What we say or else.
- Eliminate racism & sexism with racism & sexism.
- Promote equal opportunity via biased outcomes.
- Maximize self-sufficiency (and the pie, too) by giving everything away.
You get the idea. All of the statements immediately above are common Self-Referential Contradictions we experience today. The Law of Non-Contradiction is a law just like any other. Good laws are clear enough, avoiding vagueness, so that reasonable people can follow them and agree when they’ve been violated. Violations of law must have consequences to have any influence at all, which SRC’s most certainly do. Reality will destroy us out if insanity rules long enough.
SRC’s are egregious violations of the LNC, that most fundamental law of reason. Each SRC violates the law of non-contradiction in either thought or practice and, therefore, is utterly meaningless. As contradictions, they are self-referential because we don’t need to know any facts concerning any real situation to understand they’re completely bogus or wrong, if not evil.
Personified evil, or the devil, being the real thing, is a Woke elitist who tempts Christ in the Wilderness, and He shows us how to respond. Because Jesus doesn’t accept his propositions freely, the devil attempts to cancel Him throughout the rest of the story. This is how the Gospels go. Of course, the devil loses in the end, and we are left with true joy and rapture.
The Solution: Suit Up like Sigourney
When you understand the SRC concept, you will start seeing them, the Bitch and her little baby gremlins, everywhere today because, at present, our cultural and educational institutions worship them. Only elitists could do this and get away with it.
Some people continue to listen to SRC’s because they aren’t too sharp. But most listen because they simply don’t understand these contradictions or their consequences. There are many wonderful people like this, and we are trying to help them with this post.
As we have said before, intelligence has nothing to do with wisdom or a good life. But there is little society can do about blind SRC followers outside education. Again, we are trying to separate sheep, goats, and wolves here. Many SRC followers will never emerge from the Wilderness alone, except by chance or the help of others (like you).
In contrast, SRC wolves are actually very few in number, but, due to a long period of screaming loudly and aggressive action, their influence has skyrocketed over the last ten years.
The elitist SCR orators or wolves who listen to, repeat, and use SRC’s with every breath do so because it enhances their power, money, and sex. Often, such elitists employ SRC’s with authority to discipline their perceived inferiors (again, regular people), as a parent might a child. “You will do what I say or else and like it.” They will chant SRC slogans while they destroy public and private property or bludgeon those who stand in their way.
But SRC’s never help anyone because they are both analytically false and do not conform to objective reality. That’s why most regular people with good common sense either do not speak in contradictions, ignore them, or go bad and take advantage of the weaknesses they exploit.
Yet, reality is always stronger in a tribal sense than nonsense or fantasy. For example, see Afghanistan.
In most cases, if there is an idea inherent in an SRC that contains an aspect of truth, the statement can be changed to be more accurate, reducing if not eliminating the contradiction altogether. Of course, whole treatises have been written on contradiction and paradox, and human reason cannot resolve them all. Those we must accept. God has limited us here, and we will address this in later posts.
But most of the SRC’s we see today are an advanced form of lying that allow liars, deceivers, accusers, and much worse to enhance their take from society. Such SRC’s are utter nonsense and gibberish that, taken far enough, can be murderous to any society, as most Communist, socialist, and fascist regimes (all being Far Left, meaning Big Government regimes) have proven since the beginning of the 20th Century.
People – especially Americans – do not like being subjugated by force or bureaucratic propaganda. See all who were involved in the American Civil War.
As often said, if someone tells you he or she doesn’t believe in truth, you should stop listening.
To repeat, SRC’s are almost always used as cloaks or camouflage for self-gain, and they should be called-out every time encountered – politely, at first, and then later with confidence and much vigor, if necessary. This is what Sigourney does in the movie.
She is caught between the ancient threat of nature’s murderous, heartless passion (the alien normally portrayed as a dragon) and its murderous, mindless intellect (technology normally portrayed as a robot). Often, as Sigourney demonstrates, the only way to react in life’s critical moments is bravely, combining one’s heart and mind as one. Grace does this for us. We deserve little credit.
In our case, if dealing with a human being using SRC’s and not an alien, one could ask for a restatement that might express what was really intended to be true, if anything said was true at all. Truth exists among human beings by language definition that matches reality, which exists outside the opinion of any one individual.
If you don’t stop SRC’s up front and if such lies continue, then, most likely, the use of force will become a necessary remedy, in self-defense if nothing else, one of these days.
Trust Q: We will have much more on truth later. Praxis Circle is dedicated to getting our stories straight. Truth, reason, logic, honesty, loyalty, trust; they aren’t everything by any means in life – like love; they’re simply indispensable for it, and probably define it.
Summary
To conclude, the mess today is very much about SRC’s (Self-Referential Contradictions). (For another take on SRC’s, see here.) Again, once you recognize them, you will start to see them literally everywhere in countless forms. Yes, this is a worldview thing and a rather intellectual one. For now, most large universities and Hollywood are lost, and the fights are most intense in primary and secondary schools.
But don’t let it make you crazy. SRC’s are a form of sick thinking not only accepted and taught as fact but promoted by some Marxists, postmodernists, CRT or ESG junkies, etc., as the only pathway to salvation. SRC’s frequently recited become religion. As Vivek Ramaswamy proves, the Church of Diversity is a religion of the highest order.
So, SRC’s are the Bitch we must root out everywhere found in the American public square, where the First Amendment must obtain. Freedom of religion, speech, and association are foundational. Absent those freedoms, SRC’s multiply like Alien eggs, and our national spaceship will be lost.
For certain, it will get very messy before it gets better. If you don’t believe me, see the longer video version (2:44) with Sigourney and the Bitch linked here.
Now, Doug , there is no question who we are. A simple Executive Director and his not-for-profit pen name. We are not trying to hide our identity. I look forward to Praxis Circle’s next four Road to Reason posts. I know they will continue to unpack all of this. For certain, there’s quite a lot going on in human consciousness with human reason and emotion, and we can only scratch the surface, ultimately.
In the meantime, I will sit here for a while longer and behave with all our various selves, some perhaps conflicted, and only leave my Q Cave to go after SRC’s that happen by, rest their souls.
But I do have one request: Please go a bit easier on the Wicked Witches of the World. You’re getting me in trouble with my girlfriends, and they’re often not as bad as they appear.
As they say, we can’t live with them or without ’em, now, can we? Amen to that. It’s about the children and their future. They will lead us to the truth. We all need to be more like them.
