Crooks, Loons, and Monster-Loons

Takuan Seiyo has published Part 15 of “From Meccania To Atlantis” at the Brussels Journal. The latest installment is entitled “Rejecting Decoherence”, and some excerpts are below:

Still, the major problem is not the nonwhite factions that rip white society apart through their sucking of government subsidies, overloading and crippling public services such as education and health care, fostering crime, terror, cultural alienation and rupture of social capital. Even the West’s archenemy — Islam — would not have been the problem it is, had the Crooks and the Loons not brought it within. After all, if they didn’t have a ready supply of importable Muslims to bludgeon their countries with, and if there were enough of others, they would have done it with Samoans, A-Pucikwar or Dayak Ibans.

Moreover, the Crooks themselves, in government and finance, are not the main problem either, even though the economic calamity the world is going through now is 80% their work. Generally, the world has progressed nicely despite their best efforts, except when it was tripped by its Loons such as Marx, Luxemburg (Rosa), Wilson (Woodrow), Monet (Jean); Bush (W), Blair, Obama and Brown, or its Monster-Loons such as Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Tojo, Pol Pot etc.

The Monster-Loons are a special case and outside of our scope here. It suffices to say that they ride in the wake of the Loons’ lunacy — e.g. if no Danton, no Robespierre; if no Mensheviks, no Bolsheviks; if no Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Levin (1919 German communist loons), arguably no Hitler; if no Bush, no Obama — though only history will tell the latter’s lunacy grade. It’s enough therefore to concentrate on the common Loons and their singular power to attract millions of followers, in order to explain, per the metaphorical language we’ve used here, how the West has been “snatched,” its people turned into Pods (2).

Eric Voegelin traced the roots of modern Loonism to early Christian Gnostics and called it pneumopathology, i.e. sickness of the soul, or “gnostic-utopian dementia.” I am not sure that I share Voegelin’s total disapproval of Christian Gnosticism, some of which may have been wholesome and has been commented on favorably by thinkers such as Edward Gibbon, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley and others. Moreover, much of Eastern Zen and Taoist spirituality that is honest and empowering can be qualified as “Gnostic”, i.e. centered on laboriously acquired inner knowledge rather than on received knowledge.

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The difference is that Eastern Gnosticism is about saving oneself, and Western Gnosticism is about saving the world. In spite of itself.

Christian Gnostics were zealots convinced that they alone possessed the remedy to the world’s wickedness. They were particularly prone to forsaking sex and procreation as a matter of religious principle or even, like Origen, undergoing castration. And modern day Gnostics, i.e. “Progressives,” are fanatics convinced that the world can be fundamentally transformed and humanity perfected through the remedies they prescribe and, when in power, enforce. In fact the Progressives-Gnostics are intent on castrating their entire civilization. i.e. whitey, as the ultimate remedy — a goal two-thirds accomplished by now.

Both Lawrence Auster, the astute analyst of liberalism, and the cultural critic and academic Dr. Thomas Bertonneau, have distilled Voegelin’s concepts and applied them to the Obama-Pelosi-Van Rompuy-Barroso-Brown-Rudd modern matrix. As per Voegelin via Bertonneau,

“Gnosticism is a contest by an agitating minority to monopolize the representation of “immanent reality” with the goal of transforming existence and realizing what they conceive as Paradise-on-earth.

The Gnostic [snip] cannot build Paradise [snip], but because he lives in the “dream world” of magical, intention-related deeds, the Gnostic can never admit to ineffectiveness. When the Gnostic project collides with reality and begins to falter, as it inevitably does, the Gnostic regime goes into panic-mode; it hardens into totalitarian rigidity exceeding even its “normal” Puritan intolerance. [snip] The Gnostic regime attempts to conceal failure under the language of success, inequality under the claim of equivalency, dispossession of personal or corporate wealth under the jargon of social justice”.

Bertonneau channeling Voegelin limns the similarity between ancient religious and modern political ideology as a shared quest for “text5|an impossible restructuring of existence, which, if it were to succeed, would amount to the destruction of existence,” disregard for reality, a shared propensity to erect social structures based on unquestioning doctrinal fidelity rather than competency or merit, and an extreme intolerance for dissent.

Bertonneau adduces the current American economic crisis as an example of modern Gnosticism, where “text6|the magical spending of money that does not exist [snip], stubbornly fails to result in the rescue of an economy whose collapse stems, in the first place, from pathological, non-reality-related super-spending of money that did not, even then, exist.” But here I take exception. With respect to the profession of economics, addled by the Keynesian opium that prosperity ensues from spending money one (including government) does not have, yes, that is pure Gnosticism. But with respect to the governing elites that have pushed the U.S. and Europe into this miserable mess, no. The fingerprints of the Crooks on this thing are much bolder than the Loons’ are.

The illness that’s crippling the Western colossus derives from three main pathogens: greed, cowardice and lying. All three are an eternal part of the human condition. What’s unique now is that up to 100 years ago every Western country had an elite bred to suppress those vices as a matter of noblesse oblige. But the elite now is the locus where greed, cowardice and lying fester and from which they flow downward.

The lies allow the Loons — and they are the majority — to cover up their cowardice and to perpetuate their Gnostic illusions. Latching onto the same lies enables the Crooks to rule and steal. The result is the same: sepsis.

Read the rest at the Brussels Journal. Previous installments may be read here.