"THE END OF THE WORLD": CAN THE WEST BE SAVED?
Jonathan Pageau of the Symbolic World has a very important four part series behind the paywall of Daily Wire Plus (Jordan Peterson index) titled, "The End of the World" (trailer). Although evidently I can't curate the series for you here, I will attempt to compile up a short review of the content matter, built around a crucial talk Pageau had with Roman Catholic podcaster, Matt Fradd of Pints With Aquinas. The whole thing takes over three hours, but is well worth your time, perhaps joining them in savoring fat cigars and a scotch or two. "The End of the World" is mentioned too.
Jan. 2, 2025 Matt Fradd: Orthodoxy, Fairy Tales, & Neuralink (Jonathan Pageau).
As you might have guessed "The End of the World" pertains to Western civilization. It is 'an end' rather than 'the end'. Those who are familiar with Pageau's way if thinking, know that he approaches reality in rather peculiar terms.
He thinks in verticals (poles between heaven and earth) and horizontals (markers of time and space), self generating fractals, wheels, principalities, centers and fringes, and singularities and multiplicities.
The center is made up of normalcy. The strange, the out of order, the exception is on the fringes of the center. What has been happening in the Western world, is that this central norm is being replaced with the fringes, rather like a wheel spinning out of control, or a permanent state of carnival. The fool is playing king. The crazies are running the asylum.
The effect of this deliberate 'diversity' is the destruction of the center. An upside down world is being created. Pageau mentions examples from the Bible and from history where this happened before. For example Western Rome, where self-destructive cultural elements were also on the order of the day. We know it as demoralization.
Another aspect of this self-destruction is the interplay of the extremes of order and chaos. What you will get in the end stage, is a totalitarian state at the top that is omnipresent, and at the bottom a collection of individual idiosyncrasies with no connection to each other, living in complete isolation from each other.
In part four of the series Pageau explains what he thinks we can do to salvage remnants of a world that has been lost, rather like surviving the flood in Noah's ark.
There is no way around it: God must be returned to His proper place as the fountainhead of reality. Then, at the individual level we must restore ourselves to healthy, just human beings. Center ourselves around nuclear families, celebrating our unity and what binds us with rituals.
At the larger levels we need to become active in our parishes and communities, and finally at the political level as well. It is surprising that some people still think politics is the place to start changing things. Far from it. Politics is far downstream.
History and story telling are important in order to know and understand our own place in time and space, and acknowledge 'the sins of our fathers' in order not to repeat old mistakes.
Pageau sums his expose up with the conclusion that the appropriate way to live, is to worship God and leave the fool alone.
To which I would like to add a few words of my own. The genesis of the entire destruction of Western civilization is embedded in its paradigm of reality. It can't tell truth from lie, facts from 'beings of reason', mind from soul, fiction from reality, the abstraction from the physical, and it goes on and on and on.
So let's start there: with learning how to think and identify what is part of reality and what isn't. We are very close to a breakthrough on the issue of the unity of the physical and the spiritual, or as we usually word it, on Integration versus Dualism.
That should put paid to dualism in Western society where the false dichotomy reigns. Every debate on any subject is characterized by two opposing parties pitted against each other on principle. If that is not bad enough, it's been institutionalized.
No body ever even bothers to see if there is perhaps another way of looking at the problem, except from two mutually exclusive positions. Everyone is on Hegel's rat wheel (link). Wisdom and sensibility are the first victims of this paradigm that ultimately leads to a permanent state of war.
That should put paid to dualism in Western society where the false dichotomy reigns. Every debate on any subject is characterized by two opposing parties pitted against each other on principle. If that is not bad enough, it's been institutionalized.
No body ever even bothers to see if there is perhaps another way of looking at the problem, except from two mutually exclusive positions. Everyone is on Hegel's rat wheel (link). Wisdom and sensibility are the first victims of this paradigm that ultimately leads to a permanent state of war.
Comments
Post a Comment