Parallel Or Orthogonal?

     My esteemed colleague Dystopic, also known lately as Thales – you know, champ, this moniker-shifting would be unnecessary if you would just use your own name – has penned a delightful piece about the Left’s occupancy of a “parallel universe.” Those of us old enough to remember the “bearded Spock” episode on Star Trek are especially tickled by the notion...but maybe “parallel” isn’t the right word to describe the difference in orientation between mundane reality and Leftists’ preferred conceptions.

     Maybe the Left’s habitat is orthogonal to ours.

     Now, for a “universe” of any sort to be stable, its contents must conform to some set of physical laws. Moreover, we would expect those laws to be consistent with one another – i.e., they would not contradict one another’s dictates. After all, if Law X is contradicted by Law Y, the context of application being identical, how could either one be a “law?”

     When cosmologists speculate about a parallel universe, we normally imagine that it would conform to laws much like those in our universe, but with changes in one or more of the various fundamental constants. That’s a comfortable way to speculate; it allows us to import our knowledge of this universe into the one we’ve imagined. But it’s also rather limiting – and if there’s anything the Left purely hates, it’s a limit on them. Leftists demand the absolute and unqualified right to contradict themselves whenever they feel like it.

     Take marriage as an illustrative case. For how long did Leftists sneer at marriage as an outmoded, confining, unnecessary institution? That attitude goes back about a century, to the Bolshevik revolutionaries who seized control of Russia toward the end of World War I. But when homosexuals demanded the “right” to marry within their sex, it became the most important issue of our time.

     Or consider the Boy Scouts. The Left has never approved of the Scouts; it’s too patriotic and Christian-normed an organization for their tastes. But when girls and homosexuals demanded the “right” to become Boy Scouts and Scout leaders, suddenly nothing else mattered.

     Race provides an even better case. Race, to the Left, is denounced as illusory whenever anyone dares to notice and mention the statistical differences between the sexes. Yet the Left eagerly embraces the concept of race whenever it can be used to press for more government spending, or for the invasion of private demesnes on the grounds of “non-discrimination.”

     Finally, consider economics. The Left deems capitalism exploitative and destructive, and wants it condemned to death. Yet capitalism – the latitude of free men to produce and trade with one another – is the one and only source of human wealth...and the Left also wants to “redistribute” huge gobs of wealth, far larger than any welfare state has ever contemplated, to its favored activities and groups.

     If the Left occupies some universe other than ours, it’s a place of absolute and unending chaos. Its ruling “law,” if I may abuse the word this way, is that the Left shall get what it wants, no matter how badly that contradicts what it said it wanted five minutes earlier.

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     Of course, the real problem isn’t that Leftists seek to occupy some universe other than the one we know; it’s that they seek to transform this one into the imagined one of their aspirations.

     In our universe, the thing is impossible. Marriage has a definite purpose and meaning. Boys and girls differ greatly, and developmental institutions must segregate them to some extent. Race either exists or it doesn’t. Wealth that free men have not created by their insight, cooperation, and effort cannot be distributed, much less redistributed.

     None of that fazes the Left. Its demands never cease and never moderate, regardless of any and all demonstrations of impossibility. Indeed, one could easily suspect that their impossibility is why Leftists promote them.

     A multitude of demands that are impossible to satisfy will create the conditions upon which tyrannies thrive.

     I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft’s conception of Cthulhu, the ancient “god” of evil who waits in R’lyeh for the stars to be right for its return to our world. Cthulhu and his brethren seek to teach men the “freedom” of moving beyond good, evil, and all conceptions of law:

     When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.

          Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

     Of course, the “freedom” of those who are murdered is zero, but what of that? Only small minds would cavil at such a difficulty.

     So it is with the Left: endlessly dreaming of a time when all laws have been set aside, and their wills made omnipotent. The supreme irony, of course, is that it claims to be the “reality-based” community. Reality will never be quite that disordered, the protests and demands of the Left notwithstanding. Or perhaps it will be, in some universe so dominated by chaos that even demands at right angles to one another can be satisfied simultaneously. But as Dystopic / Thales notes, that’s not the universe we live in. God be thanked and praised for that.