Home The Destruction of Contradiction
Home The Destruction of Contradiction

The Destruction of Contradiction

People, countries and ideas are destroyed through their inability to resolve their contradictions. The left gained a foothold in America by exploiting the country's contradiction between its insistence on moral superiority and the actual way that the sausage got made. The left did not resolve this contradiction, instead it pretended that it had transcended the contradiction because when it made the sausage and broke the omelets, it was doing it for the greater good.

Under the old system, human misery was caused by the pragmatic problems of reality. Under the new system, it was caused by the idealistic necessities of the greater good.

For example, before ObamaCare someone who couldn't get health insurance was suffering for pragmatic reasons. With the advent of ObamaCare, someone losing their doctors and getting stuck with insurance they couldn't afford was suffering for the idealism of the greater good.

The contradiction between the aspirations of the ideal and the brutal necessities of the real were not resolved. Instead the left made the suffering of individuals and groups irrelevant.

The left expanded its collective representation beyond the individual and even the nation. It enclosed the entire world and immunized itself against any moral challenge. By representing the welfare of the entire human race, any suffering it inflicted short of that could be justified for the sake of a majority.

Eventually the left was also destroyed by its contradictions, the dream died leaving behind gulags and ghettos. Nothing had actually been fixed. And the left insisted that it was the impulse of the ideal that was noble, regardless of how badly it was managed. As it had all along, it chose to die on the ideal, rather than live with the real.

The ideal is the most vulnerable to contradiction. The left exploited the ideal only to be destroyed by it. Unlike the religions that it imitated, it could offer no spiritual transcendence. Its transcendence was in the realm of the real. It promised to make the real into the ideal, exploiting the core contradiction of human nature and destroying itself through that contradiction when the real remained unideal.

The contradiction between the real and the ideal cannot be resolved through a fanatical insistence on the ideal. That ways lies the death of individuals and of ideologies. The severity of a contradiction can be ameliorated by lessening the exigencies of the contradicting factors. But it cannot be resolved by pushing to one end or the other. It requires an external balancing factor.

An example of this is the balance between the masculine and the feminine. Both have internal contradictions that can only be balanced out with the other. A society that is wholly one or the other is on a path to destruction. Not only is a masculine or feminine society hostile to those of the other gender, but it provides the dominant gender with no means of balancing out its contradictions.

Muslim societies eschew the feminine. The Salafi crusades are very literally a war on women with young men hunting down unveiled women and religious variants, such as Sufism, that have more spiritual influences, to destroy them or remove them from the public square. Their religion aspires to the utter literacy of law without spirituality, a warrior religion whose only faith is in the supremacy of killing and which seeks out and destroys any spirituality and any female influences.

And yet the Jihadis inevitably become effeminate as they strive to recreate the missing element through homosexuality and pedophilia. The dancing boys of Afghanistan are an example of what the absolute exclusion of women leads to. Having forcefully excluded all female influences, they begin forcing female gender roles on each other. The culmination of this banishment is the infamous 72 virgins who can only be accessed through a martyrdom that resolves the contradiction between the real and the ideal through the traditional method of fanatics--  suicide.

The Jihad doesn't attempt to address the contradictions of Islam; instead it attempts to prevail over them through sheer force. And yet the very Jihad is innately corrupting, financed by drug dealing, sex trafficking and other sordid crimes that destroy the fabric of a society. Iran and Afghanistan, the two Sunni and Shiite linchpins of Islamic societies, are swimming in a sea of drugs and drug addicts.

Islam, like the left, pursues the ideal at gunpoint and destroys its followers and the ideal in the process leaving behind obscenity and abomination. By the time it's all over, what is, is worse than what was. Not only is the ideal unmet, but the real has been defiled beyond all imagination.

The West is trending toward feminine societies which are also incapable of addressing their internal contradictions without the balance of the masculine. Masculine societies compel through force, feminine societies compel through conformity. The West attempts to persuade and reassure the Muslim world that it can be part of a global club, while the Muslim world attempts to kill the West, while denying that it's doing any such thing. The outcome is a classic abusive relationship in which the woman attempts to civilize the man and the man attempts to savage the woman.

In a society dominated by a single gender, the dominant gender attempts to change the world around it, while the other gender learns to change itself. The process has achieved some success in the West, with boys learning to be less masculine and girls being told that they have to change the world. But on a global scale, the dynamic means that the West is learning to change itself into a culture more accepting of Muslim dominance.

The West needs to believe that it is in the right in order to fight. The Muslim world needs to fight to believe that it is in the right.

Every time the West fights, it believes that it is undoing its "rightness". The only way for it to be certain that it is right is to masochistically accept attack and defeat. Its suffering after a terrorist attack is a self-inflicted pain that reminds it that it has the right to defend itself. Only by feeling its own pain and seeing its own dead children, does it remember that it has a right to live. And this memory has to be revived again and again. The bloody reality of the real pushing aside the dreams of the ideal.

Rightness in the Muslim world comes from a test of strength. Its faith is on the fight and or flight response. Those who fight have faith in Allah. Those who take to flight do not, unless they make up stories about staying and fighting, as Jihadis often do. Constantly rushing into fights is an act of faith. It is the most meaningful act of faith in Islam. Everyone wins in Islam. The survivors are favored by Allah. The dead are even more favored.

Golda Meir saying that peace would come when the Arabs loved their children more than they hated the Jews was correct... and in the way of Western thinkers completely missed the point. If the Arabs loved their children more than they hated the Jews, they wouldn't be Muslims and they wouldn't have nearly as many children or as much territory. Why would they want peace, when war serves them much better?

The West has set aside too many masculine qualities in pursuit of peace and has become incapable of defending itself. It masochistically abases itself for the infinite guilts of its histories, scourging the vision of its ideals with the history of the real. Its contradictions express themselves in constant moral panics against which it is incapable of acting. It has become neurotic and paranoid, uncertain of itself and rushing frantically from one imaginary crisis to another, in its grandiosity it takes upon itself all the crimes of the earth... including the destruction of the planet through Global Warming.

The contradictions that bedevil the West cannot be mediated without balancing out its feminine qualities with masculine qualities, without bringing in the real to stand side by side with the ideal. The triumph of the left has come about through the inability to resolve this contradiction between the ideal and the real. The West too eagerly embraced the ideal and is now weighed under a burden of guilt. It has become a masochistic fanatic obsessed with atoning for its own sins.

Resolving these contradictions however would require more. They demand a purpose that can
provide transcendence.

The false purposes of the left displaced that sense of national progress that is so vital for harmonizing the ideal and the real. American Exceptionalism mediates the conflict between the ideal and the real only so long as it is an exceptionalism that is superior in human advancement in the qualities of the real, such as the conquest of the frontier and the building of great works, rather than the qualities of the ideal.

An America that is exceptional in compassion or tolerance is doomed to submit the real to the ideal and to perish rather than strike a blown in its own defense.

Contradictions come closest to resolution when they balance each other out. That is true of individuals and of nations. Marriage can harmonize the internal contradictions of male and female. National unity can likewise harmonize the contradictions of a people of different qualities because it is through other people that individuals transcend and resolve their contradictions.  

Comments

  1. The sad part about the reality of Golda Meir's quote is, Islam lacks a concept of love. Which is to say, if Golda Meir realized this, that the god of Islam cannot love, does not command love nor engender it, but rather commands war and sacrificing even one's own offspring (not only in Jihad but also in "honor killings" for those who do not toe the Islamic Party Line or even the Family party line) then she was effectively saying that peace would never come.

    Incidentally, I heard that Sikhism was basically a mingling of Hindu and Islamic beliefs. If this is so, it would explain why many of the non-Muslim honor killings are committed by Sikhs. One happened in Vancouver a few years ago.

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  2. Anonymous17/11/13

    If the exigency of 9/11 was so easily forgotten, I can't imagine that national unity can ever be achieved again.

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  3. The severity of a contradiction can be ameliorated by lessening the exigencies of the contradicting factors.
    (As the Duke John Wayne would say: I don't like going to my dictionary so you got me on that line, Pilgrim.)

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  4. Daniel,

    Two related essays you will find interesting (and probably have already read, but just in case...)

    http://www.singularity2050.com/the-misandry-bubble/

    Which identifies the same gender (in)balance in our society you wrote about.
    Be sure to check his latest post for the current update.

    And of course Kim Du Toit's pussification of the western male

    http://talltown.us/guns/nancyboys.htm




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  5. Anonymous17/11/13

    True but the Leftist priniciple is not just to find a single idea which to champion such as championing the female over the male. Every culture they co-opt is given a cause for which they must be subservient to or else risk approbation. For liberal Jews it was black civil rights, for blacks it is LGBT rights and for LGBT'ers it is islamophobia. There is a clever leftist out there who already knows what an Islamicist must submit to.

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  6. Anonymous17/11/13

    But the Muslims do love their children. That is why they send their boys off to be martyred and turn their girls into breeding machines - they truly believe that this will get (at least the boys) into heaven. And what good, loving parent does not want their child (at least the boys) to go to heaven. All this to say that there can never be harmony between Islam and the West. The two belief systems are so orthogonal that they cannot co-exist, regardless of how many bumper stickers proclaim otherwise.

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  7. Can we be real here, it is not Jihad that is corrupting, it is the society that is left behind when they win.

    Because the women are closely held and have little opportunity to explore the world, they end up marrying in their extended family or clan. That has the effect of consolidating tribalism because the different tribal groups are all tied together internally by marriage and therefore by blood, to use the word ‘blood’ in the old fashioned sense. As a result, any large political entity such as a modern nation state, is always undermined by the strong clan loyalties.

    The second difficulty is that Islam is inherently a war like culture that encourages a certain amount of spontaneous violence. Combine this with the strong tribal loyalties and you never really get an Islamic society that is both large and functionally sound. When implemented on large scale, Islam produces leaders that spend their days repressing the local populations and trying to keep from being assassinated. None of this encourages development, either intellectual or material, and so they end up being poor and backward.

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  8. Great article.

    "The left expanded its collective representation beyond the individual and even the nation."

    And that is why the Left is immoral. They sacrifice the individual, and freedom and individual rights, to the group or state. As the 20th century proved absolutely, over and over again, any political system, fascism, communism, socialism, Islam, which does not formally recognize the individual as having inviolate rights, inevitably leads to dictatorship, violence for political gain, and mounds of dead bodies, as 'worship' of the state, that is worship of an ugly fiction of the imagination, drives the system's followers to murder anyone who gets in their way.

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  9. Anonymous17/11/13

    Quite an interesting way of connecting the cultural goings on. I'm not sure I buy the essence of this (male vs female voids / contradictions). But I can't deny, this culture is surely going all-fem; 'chickification' as Rush says. However, I'm struggling to understand how deeply it happens on such young boys. (it seems beyond merely a cultural influence in many cases - more like something upset things biologically)

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  10. Anonymous17/11/13

    While you are absolutely correct and I wouldn't change any of the 4000 words you used to say it, I prefer the much simpler an more accurate answer. The left offered the lazy and low information voters "free stuff" and bough their vote.

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  11. That's not actually an answer and it's not what the article says.

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  12. Anonymous17/11/13

    Doesn't it come down to almost something as simple as the left operates under the notion that the idea is what is important? Their primary idea, a world of peaceful, equal people can be realized when the right people make it their life goal to rule over others and all the others make it their life goal to be ruled over?

    All of their ideas, the policies they propose and implement, are predominately ideas of a central government controlling all aspects of life from birth to the grave.

    They talk of progress but in reality work to regress the world into a two class system where they are the rulers, the aristocracy, and all others are their subjects.

    Another brilliant analysis of reality Daniel.

    Elaine

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  13. Anonymous17/11/13

    You posit that the left has complete control over the West, neglecting the bravado of the right and all of the male creativity of the conservo-blogosphere. I think this is your bogus blogus, way off the mark.

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  14. Elaine, thank you

    Anon, not complete control, dominance

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  15. DenisO17/11/13

    "bogus blogus, way off the mark"
    I immediately disagreed about everything you said about "the West". You describe "the Left", but obviously accept that the Left is now the West and vice versa. The Left controls the Media and much of the Government, but it is not "the West".
    That is an unbelievable conceptional error, IMO. Maybe that is the accepted fait accompli on East coast intellectuals. Shame, if so.
    Regards,

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  16. If the left did not culturally dominate the West, it would not have the power it does

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  17. Daniel, thanks for the article; some very good points.

    While I agree with most of what you said, I don't think men and women by themselves are contradictory. They are perhaps incomplete (and thereby complementary), in the context of society, but there is nothing about a man or woman that contradicts itself.

    True contradictions don't exist in reality ("out there," in the real world). The ultimate problem with the Left and Islam is that in trying to enforce the contradictions of their beliefs, they are ultimately at war with reality. This is a war they ultimately cannot win, no matter how many lives they destroy or how much suffering they bring to the world in the process.

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  18. Wow, Daniel, these comments are . . . nuts. Did these people even read your piece? I thought and think it's brilliant.

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    1. Anonymous25/11/13

      He did read it. The power attained by the West was won before are current powers that be brainwashed the American public via media control and and evaded the truth via Church of Scientology Argument style. Everyone is convinced and no one can say otherwise. In the mean time the were standing on the backs of American Giants and what they obtained in the past for us today. In essence those in control today are no more than children who've found their fathers gun.

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  19. Thank you

    I don't think everyone understood it. It may be my fault. I was writing late at night and I could have been clearer.

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  20. Rick, I think we all have our contradictions.

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  21. And, the left dominates because the right has not set as its task the purpose of defending the culture. Why don't conservatives care about America's film or literary heritage the way they do about the military or abortion?

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  22. because there is a political conservatism, more than a cultural conservatism

    For the latter, conservatives would need to begin creating their own cultural products

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  23. Abstracting the political from the cultural is tantamount to reducing the flag to a piece of cloth, or marriage to cohabitation. Ceding the cultural has cleared the way for the left's political ascendancy. The first part of Santayana's famous aphorism is "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness." It's because conservatives don't defend, having first known and remembered it, America's cultural heritage any better than progressives do that the left is able to dominate.

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  24. Daniel, you were perfectly clear. The Truth always has a crystalline quality to it, so don't be surprised if others are annoyed at the light it reflects into their ingrained thought patterns. You've written before about the subjugation of the poor Muslim male to the more powerful, older men in his tribe-- who herd all the young women into their harem-- which excludes him from any prospects for marriage, work, or transcendent fulfillment. He may as well fight in order to feel alive.

    In fact, you lightly touched on transcendence here. Regular readers appreciate and extend that very real, if ineffable, thought into their own meditations on the problem.

    Very well done, all 'round.

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  25. Joan, thank you.

    Yes, second and third sons are even more disposable in this scheme than they were under feudalism. The only real prospects are to make his own tribe through conquest. It's a standard tribal pattern and it's behind immigration and Jhadist campaigns like the one in Syria

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  26. Anonymous18/11/13

    In the X-Y axis,giving X masculine, feminine and Y rational irrational values you could easily make four quadrants like this:
    Rational, masculine: Russia, China Israel and US pre Obama
    Rational feminine: Most Western Europe and Obama´s US
    Irrational Feminine: Sweden, Norway
    Irrational masculine: Iran

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  27. Anonymous18/11/13

    Re: "Unlike the religions that it imitated, it (the leftist ideal) could offer no spiritual transcendence."

    Daniel, 'spiritual transcendence' is also only an empty idol (an idealized, unreal ideal). There is no 'spirit;' it's all physics.

    If liberal psychopathy is a disease then it's one of being a literal mental midget, of being unable (I still think it's "unwilling") to see implicit corollaries, that each choice or action will have an equally opposite consequence; they always want to have everything both ways, to eat their cake & still have it to eat later again, too! To take everything from the makers and still have more to take! They simply want the generalized, idealized hope (of no specific pains) without any generalized fears (of those specific pains), and so also to have the rights to everything without the maintenance responsibilities or duties that go with it! They always prefer to deal in generalizations and group rights, while ignoring that ALL generalizations are made by grouping real-world specifics, and that all groups (of individual humans) can't exist by negating individual humanity - but they'll always try to ignore all those pesky painful specifics of reality, and replace them with fantasy, ignoring that Hope alone is NOT "a Plan!" Fear is necessary to determine the specific source of the pains one fears, and the mistakes or problems which cause those fearful pains cannot be corrected or solved by ignoring the specifics and in stead pretending that, "Since they can be solved, then they already are! Whee!" Liberals are dangerous, infantile delinquent, criminally negligent fantasists.

    ;-(

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  28. Anonymous18/11/13

    Interestingly, this problem was also addressed today by FJ Rocca over at the DC Clothesline site:

    http://dcclothesline.com/2013/11/18/liberals-use-philosophy-pragmatism-excuse-actions-part-one/

    Njoi!

    ;-)

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  29. Anonymous19/11/13

    Another brilliant piece "The contradiction between the real and the ideal cannot be resolved through a fanatical insistence on the ideal." this applies to so many issues in America today

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  30. Anonymous10/6/16

    Daniel Greenfield is one of my intellectual heroes. His blogs are often quite brilliant, besides being true and exceedingly well-written. I am most admiring of and highly recommend his blog post 'The Deconstruction on Marriage'.

    In his current blog, 'The Destruction of Contradiction' while at once brilliant and insightful, strikes me as lacking a fundamental articulation of the meaning of the concept of 'contradiction' vis-a-vis the concepts of 'contradistinction' or 'contrary'. These latter two ideas do not require nor depend upon contradiction. Two sexes, for example, are not contradictory, they are merely two possible (or actual) forms of the same biological species with respect to gender. Indeed, gender pre-supposes male and female as possibilities (and actualities).

    In general, there are no contradictions in nature. Contradictions do not refer to beings but to ideas, ideas held by human beings. Contradiction is primarily an epistemological term, not an ontological term. Yet at the base of our epistemological 'rule of non-contradiction' is that we understand axiomatically, that in the world A cannot at the same time and in the same respect be non-A. Thus the ontological axiom is unified with the epistemological axiom: A must not be taken to be non-A, at the same time and in the same respect, because reality forbids it. To violate these axioms it to invite error, and if practiced perniciously enough, eventually, cognitive pathology and madness (a cognitive break with reality).

    Returning to our example of male and female: the law of contradiction holds that a male cannot be a non-male, nor a female a non-female. Each sex has its own essential nature. But these natures do not contradict each other. Male and female represent two sexual contradistinctions, two ways of being that are mutually possible and real, but which cannot (for higher animal forms at least) mutually coexist in the same sexual being (without pathological consequences, for humans, psychopathological consequences).

    Far from being contradictory forms of being, human sexuality is the basis of unifying the higher being of each sexual partner by complementing each other's sexual nature, at the physical, psychological, sociological, cultural, spiritual levels. It is by virtue of their mutually distinct yet complementary natures that men and women can be attracted to and love one another (at the psychological and spiritual level), engage with one another sexually (at the physical level), procreate with one another and form a family (at the sociological level), and teach their children their shared values (at the cultural level). And all of this happening to the couple at the same time and at different levels of being. There is no contradiction here, only non-contradictory and mutually complementary sexual natures.

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