Something Off The Beaten Track

     A reader just wrote to ask if I simply must continue with the doom-and-gloom pieces for some unexpressed psychological reason involving my boyhood, or might I be persuaded to post something, say, a bit uplifting? He was graciously complimentary about my usual output, my selection of topics, my focus, my writing style, and so forth. He just didn’t want to have to surf over here, as he does each morning, in anticipation of being brought down, as he put it. He’s a sunny sort who can find the silver lining around any dark cloud – I’m sure you know and despise a few people like that – and he wanted to register a vote in favor of more lighthearted pieces. You know, the kind that aren’t likely to get you eyeing the Barrett .50 and thinking about clock towers.

     It confused me, at first. I mean, do people really come to Liberty’s Torch for that kind of drivel? Posting that sort of thing makes me wonder if I’m letting my Gentle Readers down. Well, at least one person does, or hopes to do. So I tried to think of a topic about which I could hold forth with warmth, humor, and Christian love, yet do so with the splendiferous effulgence that characterizes my usual crap.

     For a while, I came up drier than the Mojave Desert. I suppose I was in the wrong frame of mind for happy stuff. So I decided to seek a distraction… and I found one:

When I was a steak cook at Ponderosa steakhouse, age 16, this beautiful waitress that went to another high school would always come back and sit next to me after her shift was over and talk.

I finally said “why are you still here? You are not getting paid. You should go home.” pic.twitter.com/2LEoel4rxQ

— Adam Rossi (@rossiadam) July 25, 2026

     Gentle Reader, you must read the comments to that tweet. Especially if you’re a man. I lack the words to capture the poignancy of those tales. If you don’t have a personal story that belongs in that collection, you’re a rare and precious jewel.

     But I do.

* * *

     It was 1967. I was a senior in high school, and my eyes were on the stars. Almost literally! I was soon to depart to my chosen university and begin (I hoped) a career in physics. More on that some other time.

     As the school’s Brainiac, I had had the usual young nerd’s experience of romance: that is, none. I’d noticed the girls around me, some of whom were quite fetching, but I’d never dared to approach any of them. As I was two years younger than all of them, it struck me as pointless.

     I was a loner even then. I used to walk to school and back, even though it was a three-mile distance from my family’s apartment and I was fully entitled to bus transportation. Needless to say, I had to set out early. But I walked fast, and I always got there well before anyone else. I would sit in the cafeteria and read until the time came to report to homeroom, where attendance was taken. For a long time I did so alone.

     But not always. There came a day in late winter when, with some fifteen or twenty minutes to go before I had to scurry off to homeroom, a very pretty teen girl sashayed down the hall. I noticed, of course. I tried hard to maintain “situational awareness” even back then, as the Class Nerd often becomes the Class Target. She glanced over at me, smiled, and hurried along. I gave it no further thought.

     Until the next morning, when she didn’t hurry along. She came directly to my table, perched herself next to me, gave her name as Shelly, said she was a junior, and started to chat. It was high school girl stuff: her classes, her friends, who so-and-so was seeing, new pop music, what’s good on TV, and so on. Nothing hugely consequential.

     I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified, before or since.

     I was the focus of a girl. That is, she was there because I was there. She was talking to me. And she was pretty! Beautiful, really. Her nose was a little larger than she might have liked, but I could find no flaw in her. I couldn’t imagine why I had her company and her attention. In that, perhaps you can see the embryo of the Curmudgeon Emeritus I would someday become.

     As with most Class Nerds, I had no small talk. My head was full of equations. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. She gave me plenty of opportunities to respond, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how to do so. I just tried my best to smile. It must have been the most artificial-looking smile in the history of Mankind.

     Well, at long last the bell rang, we wished one another a nice day, and parted to go to our respective homerooms. I gave a silent prayer of thanks for having been released from that conversation before I could beclown myself and tried to have a “normal” day thereafter.

     But she came to chat me up the next day, too. And the next. And the next, which was a Friday. If your high school years are too far back to remember the significance of Fridays to high school kids, allow me to refresh your memory: They matter. A lot.

     Friday was “game time.” Commitment time. It was when your hopes for the evening and weekend become either if-onlies or palpably real. If you have plans to socialize, Friday is when you discover who will have you, if anyone, and for what.

     High schoolers make a lot of bad decisions on Fridays. Some prove to be mere embarrassments. Others are destructive, or cruel.

     I had no evening or weekend socializing plans. No one else would have me, which made such plans moot. At least, that was how matters stood when I arrived at school Friday morning.

     As I mentioned, Shelly showed up again. In fact, she was there a little before me. I was in a wobbly state of mind. Yet I knew that I had to be there. If I didn’t show, she might take offense, and I didn’t want that.

     She started chatting with me again, the same pattern as before. You know how that goes: Math is really tough this year! Nancy has to go to summer school. Karen has started going out with Joel! Have you heard the new one from Paul Revere and the Raiders?

     I did my best to provide appropriate responses, though I doubt I improved on our previous encounters. She rambled on for a few minutes in an engaging, perfectly pleasant fashion. Never a mean word about anyone or anything. But it didn’t take long for her to get to the Sunday punch.

     She didn’t ask me out directly. She was subtle. She mentioned that her usual crowd was going to a concert that evening. Rock concert tickets were comparatively cheap back then. All the same, she didn’t want to go; she disliked rock-concert volume levels. I sympathized, of course. But her next two sentences are engraved on the inside surface of my skull:

     “But I don’t want to just sit at home. What do you think you’ll be doing tonight?”

     It blindsided me. I couldn’t believe she was asking me out. And I had no relevant, coherent idea how to respond. But she was looking at me, compelling me to make some kind of reply.

     Eventually I replied that I had no plans other than to go another chapter forward in Halliday and Resnick (my AP physics text). You can imagine how that went over.

     I think that blindsided her. She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Maybe she was hoping I’d come up with a suggestion spontaneously. Soon enough the bell rang, she wished me a good day, and ambled off.

     That was the last time I sat in the cafeteria before homeroom. I never saw her again.

* * *

     “She doesn't love you anymore. Maybe she did once, I don't know, but she doesn't now! These are used emotions. It's time to trade ‘em in! Memories are meant to fade, Lenny. They're designed that way for a reason.” – From Strange Days

     The memory above hasn’t faded. I knew I’d blown an opportunity that had been brought to me on a silver platter. I was smart enough to realize that. And I still wonder, now and then, how things would have turned out had I untangled my teenage tongue and suggested something moderately fun to Shelly.

     Maybe the reason memories are designed to fade is to spare us old folks the regrets and self-disgust that would arrive with them if they were fresh and vivid. I couldn’t say.

     I know this isn’t a bright and cheery piece. Sorry. But once I remembered, I had to get it out. Forgive me.

Schismata Part 4: The Biggest Chisel

     There are days when the total lack of shame of anti-Americans in power completely occupies my thoughts. Yes, I speak here of the Democrats. It’s impossible to embarrass them. It’s equally difficult to squeeze the truth out of them. One thing comes through clearly: they will do anything to get and retain absolute, unbounded power.

     Their principal opponents in that quest are not Republican politicians, who are spineless almost to a man and care far more about media air time and column-inches than they do about any supposed principle, but actual Americans. The bulk of us are of European descent, though there are exceptions. Thus, the Democrats strain to the utmost to conceal their machinations from us, though occasionally they’ll let favored members of the GOP in on the scam.

     Apparently Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri is not one of the favored ones:

BREAKING: I am releasing a newly obtained internal Presidential memorandum from the Biden White House.

It details how Biden was advised to block President Trump's deportation of 3.1 MILLION noncitizens—including Tren de Aragua members—through “Temporary” Protected Status. pic.twitter.com/oIquq3pRm7

— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) July 23, 2026

     The Democrats’ political conquest of these United States of America requires that the Euro-American bulwark of the nation be diluted and, ultimately, erased. The replacement population must have no attachment to any aspect of Americanism, especially the constraints on government codified in the Constitution. Why else would the “undocumented Americans” come almost exclusively from Third World nations?

     Recently I’ve been writing about the Left’s creation of fault lines in the American national culture and ethos. While some of those are rather subtle, the importation of non-Americans, mainly uneducated and unskilled and often of a creed hostile to everything American, is blatant. They’ve become so numerous that, as the saying goes, you can’t swing a fist without hitting one. Current estimates of illegal aliens within our borders hover around 60 million.

     Those aliens constitute the gravest of cracks in our common culture and ethos. They maintain numerous exclaves within which American law is effectively unenforceable. They don’t yet outnumber us, but they’re outbreeding us. They’ve already managed to take over a few of our larger cities. Their culture contains little that a Euro-American would recognize.

     Illegal immigration is the Left’s most devastating weapon against America as she was founded. That makes this memo more than a smoking gun of Democrat duplicity. By making plain the Biden Interregnum’s plans to impede the Trump / MAGA agenda, it makes the war against the Constitution and the American political ethos too visible for anyone to overlook.

     The SAVE Act has become critical to the future of America’s elections. Now is the time for maximum pressure on the Senatorial Republican caucus to suspend or eliminate the filibuster and pass that bill. They don’t want it – a lot of them profit from illegal immigration, and nearly all of them are in terror of what the media will say about them – so they must be compelled to pass it against their wills.

     Get on the horn to Republican Senators. Make sure they know that you will actively work against any of them who refuse to support the SAVE Act. If you think you know of a Democrat Senator who may be persuasible, contact him too.

     Don’t let up.

A Pointed Observation

     This one is from John Hinderaker:

     [26th Texas Congressional district Representative Brandon] Gill is the new hero of the conservative movement, largely because of his skill at questioning liberal witnesses…. Gill’s secret is that, instead of giving speeches as most members of Congress do, he actually asks the witnesses fair questions. And, time after time, it turns out that their ideology prevents them from giving coherent answers.

     Hinderaker scores twice in that short passage. If you’ve ever listened to a Representative interviewing a witness, you know what constitutes a “question” from a Representative. Virtually every one of them attempts to fold his own viewpoint into the question, such that the witness cannot possibly reply in a useful fashion without first conceding the Representative’s viewpoint. This is tolerated because it serves the agendas of the Representatives doing the questioning.

     Brandon Gill doesn’t do that. He asks simple, one-part questions. Usually, the witness can and should answer yes or no. A hostile witness will feel trapped by that. He’ll do his best to dance around the question: to obfuscate, to divert to side issues and irrelevancies, or to swerve to an attack on some disliked figure. He will never, ever answer yes or no.

     A sharp question must be simple. It must not have several parts; that clouds what the questioner is asking. It must be possible for the witness to answer it clearly. Indeed, in its simplicity it will make plain when the witness doesn’t want to answer clearly.

     Don’t look to Congress for copious examples of sharp, simple questions. Brandon Gill is just about the only Representative who asks them.

     “[N]ot just politicians but everybody responsible for communications in any way ought to take such a pledge [i.e., of a commitment to clarity]. The point, of course, is to cut through the thick grease and old varnish to discover what kind of material lies beneath. And the best tool the radical skeptic has is the sharp question—“Why?” “What for?” “When?” “What do you mean?” “Who?” These are terrifying questions, in a way, considering how seldom they are answered. And when the answers are given, they don’t appear to be the right answers.” -- Arthur Herzog

     Words to live by.

Schismata Part 3: The Cracks

     I’ve received a couple of questions about the neologism in the titles of these pieces. The resemblance to stigmata is deliberate. The wounds inflicted on Jesus Christ during his Passion and Crucifixion were preliminaries to His death on the Cross. The last of the stigmata, the spear wound to His side, was inflicted to guarantee that He was dead before His body could be taken down.

     My concept of schismata parallels the stigmata in that regard. The cracks in our philosophical and cultural unity being inflicted by the Left’s vanguard are preliminaries to a deathblow. They’re intended to soften us up for the kill. And they’ve been doing a bang-up job… or they were.

* * *

     As reality itself is a unity, all true wisdom is a unity as well. For wisdom is something other than material knowledge about “how things work.” True wisdom is the acceptance of reality in all its facets. The truly wise man “concedes the Tao,” as C. S. Lewis might have said. He doesn’t attempt to deny any part of it, for he knows its unity.

     Philosophy, “love of wisdom” etymologically, is a unity as well. Most peoples with a common culture share a philosophical outlook that’s seldom articulated. One aspect of that outlook is made visible in what they hail as beautiful. The architectural wonders of Europe, especially its cathedrals, testify to the esthetics of the culture that produced them. That esthetic cannot be separated from the rest of its enveloping outlook without destroying both.

     As I noted previously, that is where the Left chose to attack. No other part of the Western outlook was as vulnerable. Esthetics was uniquely sensitive because of the notion of relativism.

     In retrospect, we ought to have known better. To place the cathedrals and symphonies of Christian Enlightenment culture on a balance scale with the mud huts and grunted chants of self-mutilating savages was insane from the first. But the premise that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder,” rather than an aspect of reality itself, made it possible.

     The rejection of esthetic absolutes provided the ingress the destroyers needed.

* * *

     Once esthetic relativism had swept over Western culture, other aspects of the Western philosophical outlook became vulnerable. The key target was objectivity itself. Undermining the conviction that reality is real was the goal of the anti-Western forces. That could not be done by direct attack. It had to be through the promotion of non-Western outlooks, concepts of beauty, and “ways of knowing.”

     That trend began in Europe before the World Wars, but it accelerated sharply in the Sixties. That was when relativism as a philosophical primary took firm root. Millions of credulous young Westerners seized upon it. Their elders did little or nothing to correct them.

     Nonsense was promulgated as truth. Bizarre notions about reality as a plastic that individuals could reshape as they please were touted as wisdom. Relativism, already established in the arts, made it possible to introduce absurdities as acceptable alternatives to the real… and to get them accepted by millions.

     I was there. I was part of it. I remember it too well.

* * *

     “What is truth?” – Pontius Pilate

     Once, in giving a presentation to a college class in philosophy, I asked the students whether any of them had ever been interested in magic. A few hands went up...all of which belonged to persons who were somewhat reluctant to admit it. I smiled and told them not to be overly embarrassed, for magic, if it worked, would appear to be an easier way of achieving one’s aims – some of them, at least – than the alternatives. That’s its attraction.

     But magic doesn’t work. Why, then, are there persons who call themselves witches and claim to practice magic? Why are they granted the smallest amount of respect?

     If magic worked, it would be the focus of intense study and experimentation. Researchers would flock to the field, hoping to tease out the laws that govern it. Money would pour into the exploration of its limits and potential applications. None of that has happened.

     Another set of notions, similar to magic, is that of psi powers: in essence, mind over matter/energy. For a time, that was a field of investigation for some fringe researchers, but it yielded nothing and has been relegated to the mediums (not “the media”) and stage magicians. But again, there are persons who proclaim themselves to be telepaths, or clairvoyants, and make a living out of demonstrating those “powers.” Why are they accorded any respect?

     Ironically, a brilliant fiction writer, Robert Silverberg, provided a summary of the reasons:

     “For the last eight, ten years, we’ve all been trying to stumble toward some kind of workable synthesis, some structural correlative that’ll hold the world together for us in the middle of all the chaos. The pot, the acid, the communes, the rock, the whole transcendentalist thing, the astrology, the macrobiotics, the Zen—we’re searching, right, we’re always searching? And sometimes finding. Not often. We look in a lot of dumb places, because basically we’re mostly dumb, even the best of us, and also because we can’t know the answers until we’ve worked out more of the questions. So we chase after flying saucers. We put on Scuba suits and look for Atlantis. We’re into mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness, a thousand kinds of irrationality. Whatever they’ve rejected, we buy, often for no better reason than that they turned it down. The flight from reason. I don’t entirely defend it. I just say it’s necessary, it’s a stage we all have to pass through, the fire, the annealing. Reason wasn’t sufficient. Western man escaped from superstitious ignorance into materialistic emptiness: now we’ve got to continue on, sometimes down blind alleys and false trails, until we learn how to accept the universe again in all its mysterious inexplicable tremendousness, until we find the right thing, the synthesis, the getting together that lets us live the way we ought to be living.”

     [From The Book of Skulls]

     They – we – were looking for magic.

* * *

     But “mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness,” et cetera are not of the Tao. To compel respect for them, by whatever means, violates the precepts of rational thought. Silverberg may have known that, back in 1972 when he wrote The Book of Skulls. Indeed, a man that intelligent could hardly fail to know it. Those who sought to undermine the Western outlook – the philosophical bedrock of the Christian Enlightenment – knew it well.

     The fragmentation of that bedrock proceeded apace throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century. Magic, irrealism, and outright solipsism, propelled in part by the burgeoning drug plague, advanced as alternatives to reality itself. A critical moment arrived with the introduction and acceptance of a nonsense phrase: “our truth,” or alternately “your truth.” That became popular with the moral / ethical relativists, those determined to open a crack in the moral norms promulgated by Christianity.

     The assault on esthetic norms had made inroads for assaults on other norms. In large part that was through the personal charisma of the “new artistes.” It was also powered by the adolescent thrill of rebellion, flipping off the “straights” and “doing your own thing.” The cracks would soon be exploited by the purveyors of a deadly kind of magic: the “reality is plastic” notion that makes it possible to believe in impossibilities.

     More anon.

Schismata Part 2: The Unity

     A long time ago, I wrote:

     In the kitchen, Louis took a small saucepan from the cabinet beneath the cooktop, filled it half-full with hot water, and set it on a burner. From a drawer he produced a large bulb-type thermometer, attached it to a pair of wooden grips, and passed the combination to her.
     “This is going to be a little different. I’m going to make a prediction, and then we’ll see if it comes true.” He gestured at the saucepan. “I’m going to light the stove and heat the water in the pot. You put the thermometer in and watch the reading, but don’t let the bulb touch the pan! I predict that no matter how high we turn the flame, and no matter how long we let it heat, the temperature of the water will never rise past two hundred twelve degrees. Okay?”
     “Okay.” She dipped the bulb into the pot. The reading rose to a hundred fifteen degrees. He lit the burner, turned the flame up high, and they watched.
     When giant bubbles began to rise through the water, the thermometer read two hundred twelve. She kept it as steady as she could, never allowing the bulb to touch the metal of the pan. The water level dropped and the kitchen filled with steam, but the reading stayed at two hundred twelve until Louis quenched the burner ten minutes later.
     “We’ve boiled away too much to keep going safely. So? What does that mean to you?”
     She shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it supposed to mean something?”
     “Well, maybe not. But what does it mean to you that my prediction came true?”
     “You knew it would be that way.”
     “And what does that mean?”
     She started to speak and stopped herself. She knew his style. There was a pattern in the sequence of apparently unrelated things he had shown her that day. He was waiting for her to see it. The Nag lent a hand.
     Limits. He’s shown you three limits. Three things that wishing can’t do anything about.
     “Water’s just that way, right? It always stops at two-twelve. You can’t force it any higher.”
     He nodded as the huge grin returned to his face. “That’s right. Not at sea level, anyway. That’s one of the unvarying properties of water.” He took the saucepan to the sink and emptied it. There was a hiss and a new cloud of steam as the water ran over the cold porcelain.
     “Scientists study the properties of things all the time.” He set the pan down in the sink and turned back to her. “They look for patterns in the way things behave, and then they test their understanding by making predictions. When their predictions work, they gain confidence that they’re on to something. When their predictions fail, they junk their theories and start over. Mostly by little steps, sometimes by big ones, always building on the learning of those that came before them, this is how scientists come to know the world.”
     He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms against his chest. There was something in his demeanor she hadn’t seen before, a kind of all-pervading delight that transformed him and made it impossible to look away from him.
     “Scientists always look for the widest, most comprehensive patterns they can find, and then they try to explain them. And they’ve noticed that, the wider and deeper they go, the simpler the explanations seem to get.
     “The great discoveries of the past three centuries have all pointed toward the existence of an enormous central fact, a single law for the whole world and everything in it. All the little patterns we see in things, like legs only being so fast, or arms only being so strong, or water never rising past two-twelve Fahrenheit, are just special cases of that central law, like the differently shaped shadows a statue will cast depending on how you turn it in the sun. Does that suggest anything to you, Chris?”
     It took her a moment to register the question. She began to think. He waited in silence.
     A million million details. A single truth giving rise to them all. Human reason sifting the details for the patterns that hid in them. Human knowledge of the patterns accumulating over the centuries, gradually reconstructing the statue from its innumerable shadows.
     “The more you know, the simpler it all gets,” she whispered. “The parts might be confusing, but it’s made to be understood whole.” The thrill of discovery was coursing through her like an electric current. “Louis, it couldn’t have happened that way by chance, could it?”
     He folded his hands and looked down at them.
     “Some people think it could have, Chris.”
     “Do you?”
     “No.”
     “And that’s religion?”
     He nodded.

     That was a young genius attempting to explain the impulse toward religious belief to another young but untutored genius. He’d found God in natural law. The uniformity and consistency of natural law seemed to him to mandate a single great Lawgiver. Other great minds have done the same, though not all of them.

     Yet Louis’s insight, entirely apart from its religious overtones, has another implication of critical import: All laws are one. All truths are one. They intertwine and support one another. Were any one of them to be pulled loose, the edifice would crumble.

     Though many would disagree, the unity is there.

     I’ve written that for an individual to accept any single fact as objectively irrefutable would compel him to accept all the rest of reality, given time. But after long reflection, I’ve come to believe that the reverse is true as well: If he could successfully deny any one objectively demonstrable fact, it would force him to deny all the rest of objective reality. He’d have to! They’re intertwined. Any one thread that’s pulled loose would unravel the whole garment.

     It may be that the enemies of the Western edifice – what I’ve called the Christian Enlightenment — are more aware of this than are most of us who strive to defend it. Their attacks have demonstrated that their tacticians have some insight. A smart tactician doesn’t pit strength against strength. He always looks for a weakness to attack.

     The weaknesses of Western civilization are those realms of thought in which we’ve entertained disputes about objective truths… including the mystifying determination of some to dismiss the concept of an objective reality entirely.

* * *

     I led off yesterday’s piece by rhapsodizing, a bit wistfully, about the Apollo 11 mission. In what probably struck many Gentle Readers as the all-time champion of jagged segues, I leaped thence into a tirade about the Left’s attack on the arts.

     By now, you know that what I do, I do deliberately.

     Though I know that there are people who claim that the moon landing was faked – that men have never crossed that divide – only they take themselves seriously. They’re in a special category of naysayers, along with the flat-Earthers and Man Will Never Fly Society. But the naysayer, a.k.a. the skeptic, is an important creature. Provided that he is honest, he assists the rest of us in answering questions about natural laws. The honesty part is not optional: he must be willing to concede when he’s been proved wrong by objective means.

     The nature of objectivity is a tender point in the Western psyche. It’s unprovable, because proof is inapplicable to things that cannot be categorized. Objectivity isn’t a concept; it’s reality itself. To deny objectivity is to deny that the world we perceive is anything but a figment of our imaginations.

* * *

     I feel no need to go into the solipsist or social-constructionist fallacies today. Suffice it to say that these are the end states of the denial of objectivity. They who strive to destroy the Christian Enlightenment don’t want to go that far. They want something like this:

     ’There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ’Repeat it, if you please.’
     ”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.
     ”Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ’Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
     Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ’yes’ or ’no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
     O’Brien smiled faintly. ’You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. ’Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’
     ’No.’
     ’Then where does the past exist, if at all?’
     ’In records. It is written down.’
     ’In records. And- ?’
     ’In the mind. In human memories.
     ’In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
     ’But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ’It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’
     O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
     ’On the contrary,’ he said, ’you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.’

     With themselves as “The Party,” of course.

     If all of reality is truly a unity, then successfully attacking it at one weak point offers the best chance of destroying the acceptance of reality itself – that is, reality as objective, ontologically prior to perception, statement, theory, and opinion. The weakest point was in esthetics, the special province of the human activities called the arts. Accordingly, that was where the destroyers struck.

     “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” ran the old saw. Nothing that blatantly false has ever received as much deference. Beauty – esthetic Quality, as Pirsig would say – inheres in the object itself. We perceive it, call it beautiful, and think that in doing so we’ve rendered a personal judgment, but in point of fact we are merely recognizing a fact – something prior to our perceptions; something that simply is. The artists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras accepted that without bothering to debate it. Their works exemplify their acceptance.

     As usual, C. S. Lewis had something to say about it:

     She saw from the windows of the train the outlined beams of sunlight pouring over stubble or burnished woods and felt that they were like the notes of a trumpet. Her eyes rested on the rabbits and cows as they flitted by and she embraced them in heart with merry, holiday love. She delighted in the occasional speech of the one wizened old man who shared her compartment and saw, as never before, the beauty of his shrewd and sunny old mind, sweet as a nut and English as a chalk down. She reflected with surprise how long it was since music had played any part in her life, and resolved to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening. Or else—perhaps—she would read a great many Shakespeare sonnets. She rejoiced also in her hunger and thirst and decided that she would make herself buttered toast for tea—a great deal of buttered toast. And she rejoiced also in the consciousness of her own beauty; for she had the sensation—it may have been false in fact, but it had nothing to do with vanity—that it was growing and expanding like a magic flower with every minute that passed. In such a mood it was only natural, after the old countryman had got out at Cure Hardy, to stand up and look at herself in the mirror which confronted her on the wall of the compartment. Certainly she was looking well: she was looking unusually well. And, once more, there was little vanity in this. For beauty was made for others.

     If yesterday’s piece didn’t make sense to you at first reading, perhaps it will today.

* * *

     I try not to go on at great length here. This is one of my longer pieces, yet it’s composed principally of citations of other works. In the next segment I’ll attempt to solidify the connections between the attacks noted here and the pillars of our intellectual realm.

     Have a nice day.

Schismata Part 1

     Depending on what time zone you were in at the time, either today or tomorrow, in the Year of Our Lord 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the surface of the Moon. For many, that moment was the high-water mark of Western Civilization. In the person of an American astronaut, Mankind had escaped its womb and begun its journey to the stars.

     But the matter was far from settled. “Those who have not joy” (C. S. Lewis) immediately began to denigrate or cast doubt on the achievement. Some were blatant, others subtle. A number strove to recast the Apollo landing as somehow tainted by slavery, “imperialism,” or whatever else they could conjure up. A few tried to reduce its significance by stressing that the Moon is “conveniently close,” which makes getting there “no big deal.” Others pointed to the competitive, quasi-combative aspect of the “Space Race.” Had it not been for the Soviets’ early lead in space travel, they claimed, America would never have cared about a Moon landing. And so on, ad nauseam.

     We ought to have paid more attention to the denigrators and naysayers. They were the point of an invisible spear aimed at America’s heart. There was significant pressure behind that spear. It had already made an inroad into our national psyche. It penetrated ever more deeply as the years rolled past.

* * *

     The Sixties, for all the hype that’s been lavished on them, were the beginning of America’s decline. Those who sought to destroy us knew that you don’t start at the top. To bring down a society, you locate its foundation and work to undermine it. The foundation stones of the extraordinary achievement that Robert A. Heinlein called “the Renaissance Civilization” were all but invisible to the great majority of Americans. In consequence, we failed to recognize their attackers or grasp the aim of their efforts.

     Rather than follow my usual practice, I’ll cut to the chase:

The foundation of the United States of America
Was made from Christian ethics and political freedom.

     Those aren’t things that would yield to the first blows of the chisel. They are – or were – too deeply ingrained in the American psyche to be quickly shattered. So deeply, in fact, that the average American of the first decades after World War II never thought about them. They were omnipresent, like air. More, we had inherited them from prior generations. It was easy to believe that that’s just how things are and always will be.

     We never thought about why we believed that. That made it easy for the underminers to chip away undisturbed.

* * *

     It was the Sixties in which the attacks on our foundation became generally visible. Conspicuous socialist and communist movements began to proliferate in “centers of higher education.” Those things are inherently opposed to both freedom and Christianity. Their purveyors were clever; they aimed first at cultural targets: the arts. They strove to displace the esthetics that ruled music, painting, sculpture, dance, fiction, and entertainment. For they understood, as many of us did not, that those things reinforce a people’s sense of themselves and their achievements.

     Ironically, those who railed against the new, anti-Christian esthetics were beaten back with a weapon that baffled them: artistic freedom. That was presented to us with the implication that the nouvel artiste has an affirmative right to stand alongside traditional practitioners. It occurred to very few that freedom includes the freedom to condemn.

     Collectivist nostrums would soon infiltrate the educational system. Clouds began to form around basic concepts such as rights and justice. The arts had lifted the tent flap and made it possible. Eastern European intellectuals had embraced the Gramscian prescription and brought it to receptive American “scholars” who were looking for something “new.”

     First in the arts, then in “soft” studies such as psychology, sociology, and economics, American universities became battlegrounds between the Left and the Right.

* * *

     This is really an introductory piece. I can’t finish it in one Sunday; there’s too much ground to cover. (Besides, I have laundry to do, a cat room to clean, and meatballs to make.) I wanted to introduce the idea and ideas of the Sixties, “the Summer of Love,” as the appropriate starting point for examining the attack on America’s conceptual foundation.

     It’s time for the gloss that’s been smeared over that decade to be wiped away, in the interests of clearsighted understanding of our plight and its roots.

The Unique Product

     States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude and their decay. – Walter S. Landor

     Incentives and disincentives determine everything.

     Yes, I know that’s too strong a statement. But to put it that way makes it memorable, a mantra for the armchair analyst. He can chant it as he strives to understand some process that at first looks baffling.

     Franz Oppenheimer divided human action in pursuit of a goal into two categories: the economic means, which is characterized by production and peaceful trade; and the political means, whose determinant is the use of coercion: i.e., force and intimidation. For most of the past century, the economic means has steadily if grudgingly given way to the political means. This deserves to be studied far more deeply than it has been to date, for the political means is inherently parasitic. It does not produce; rather, it feeds on the production of others.

     The organization of the political means is the institution we call the State.

     The specifics of how States originate have varied across the millennia, but the conditions required for its persistence have always been what they are today: It must possess both the tolerance, however grudging, of the subject populace, and the acceptance of all forces sufficiently powerful and proximate to challenge it. I’ve written about the latter requirement on several occasions. Today, my focus is on the former one: specifically, what might cause a State to lose the tolerance of its subjects.

* * *

     The detail questions behind subjects’ tolerance of a State are simple:

1. What “product” does the State offer us?
2. Can we afford it?
3. Is it “good enough?”
4. If any of the answers to the above questions are negative, what would it cost to oppose and perhaps ultimately topple the State?

     The answers to those questions are never uniform and never static. They change according to time, place, and the identity of the person answering them. When the answers begin to coalesce in the negative direction, the State is at risk of rebellion.

     States claim to offer their subjects many things, but beneath them all is an offer of justice. Give the State the monopoly power to define and enforce justice, and thereafter the State will see to those duties. Those who seek to offend against justice will be pursued and punished; when possible, their victims will be made whole. That offer is the State’s basic product.

     In the usual case, subjects are not permitted to refuse the State’s product. Penalties are imposed upon those who try. The State is therefore not only a monopolist, but one that can enforce the acceptance of its product. That brings the price and quality of the product to the forefront. How good is the State’s justice, and how expensive is it over the long term?

     In the marketplace, vendors compete through price, quality, and their reputations. That allows many vendors to sell products that perform the same or greatly similar functions. The State’s product is qualitatively different.

     Competition is anathema to the State, for it must involve the loss of the State’s monopoly over the use of coercion. When a competitor arises, the State immediately moves to crush it. Should it succeed in doing so swiftly and without greatly disturbing its subjects’ tenor of life, it would represent its action as justice. Otherwise, the applicable terms would be insurrection, rebellion, or civil war.

     But a competitor to the State can only be potentially viable if it can outperform the State at its own game: justice. That is the incentive for the State to deliver on its promise of justice. The open and obvious non-provision of justice by States around the world is a curiosity of note.

* * *

     Inasmuch as States have been notably deficient in providing their subjects with justice, they must defend themselves from potential competitors who are willing and able to do the job. There aren’t many ways to pre-squelch competition. Probably the commonest approach is to deny potential competitors the means by which to compete: i.e., to outlaw the possession of weapons by anyone but agents of the State. It’s been widely tried, but it’s seldom worked.

     In one of the most dramatic cases of competition in the provision of justice, the Cosa Nostra, deeply analyzed in this essay, has evolved an approach of unsurpassed competitive effectiveness. In parts of Italy it commands more respect than the State. Yet the Cosa Nostra is more voracious than the State, and even more ruthless. Russia’s Bratva is organized along similar lines, and is similarly voracious and ruthless.

     Many States have been baffled by organized crime. They recognize the threat and move against it, but without much success. That they’re being out-competed and could redress the problem simply by fulfilling their promises of justice at a modest cost to their subjects seems not to occur to them. At least, that’s the gentlest explanation.

     Justice is a unique product. The State inevitably insists on being a monopoly provider, then proceeds to underperform ever more visibly as time passes. That incentivizes the emergence of competitors.

     When several organizations in a given locale simultaneously offer to provide justice, violence won’t necessarily produce a victor. Even the most powerful State can fail to maintain its monopoly. Sometimes the only possible resolution is a fragmentation into separate territories – “turf” is the usual term – involving agreements not to compete across territorial borders.

     This is the process that has produced our current world order, in which States compete with one another for territory and population. It also accounts for how and when new nations are born. That having been said, I shall leave all further inferences to my Gentle Readers.

A Reissue

     As of this morning, a new, illustrated edition of The Warm Lands is available at Amazon:

     The world of Aeol is dying, and no one knows why.

     The mana conduits that once sustained all life on the continent have shifted. Rivers of ancient power that flowed north to south for centuries now run east to west, drawn toward a single destination no one can explain. Gregor of Serebal, a journeyman sorcerer tasked with charting these invisible currents, has crossed the lifeless wastes of the Great Waste alone. He has seen entire civilizations reduced to scattered pockets of desperate survival. He is not easily shaken.

     But nothing prepared him for Anam.

     Laella was born gifted, touched by magic she never asked for and had not learned to control. When that magic made her a virgin mother, her village turned against her. Her son was executed by the ruler who feared what she represented. She was left with nothing: no family, no home, no future. When Gregor arrives, she is a woman already stripped of everything.

     What grows between them in the wasteland is not a fantasy romance. It is something quieter and more lasting than that. Two people, each carrying damage the other cannot fully see, choosing each other anyway. Walking west together toward a mystery that will demand more from them than either imagined possible.

     The Warm Lands is a standalone literary fantasy built entirely around its characters. There are no doorstop sequels, no sprawling cast, no magic system explained in appendices. There are only Gregor, Laella, and the world they must save at the cost of everything they have fought to build together.

     For readers who have been searching for a fantasy that takes them seriously.

     Scroll down a bit and you’ll find the three-minute video trailer I’ve commissioned for it.

     Yes, I’ve raised the price. I hope to recoup some of the $4800 I’ve spent on the new cover and the illustrations. The C.S.O., ever the accountant, shrugged and said “You have to spend money to make money.” We shall see!

     There will be a companion paperback edition in a few days as well.