Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the collapse of morality in the world coincides with the decoupling of Christianity from the public square. This has allowed previously absurd questions to be asked. Like, a girl can have a penis, gay marriage isn’t an absurdity, and Islam is peaceful. These things are objectively not true but we are expected to believe and repeat or else we are slandered. We are to accept subjective fantasies instead of objective reality. This is all well and good if it was in a simulation but we live in the real world with real consequences for real people who fall victim to absurd ideas. There is no way acting on absurdity can yield anything but woe. How many have jumped off cliffs thinking their home made wings would hold them aloft? The collapse of morality has opened the door to absurdity.
That which is absurd cannot long last. This doesn’t seem a big stretch of logic to me. Like fabricating wings and leaping from a high tower, absurd actions must fail. This is because it’s a category error. Reality is one category, and mentality is another. When a subjective mentality is applied to the category, reality, it cannot categorically work. That would be like using spray paint to mend a hole in a barbed wire fence. Moreover, no matter how much you want spray paint to mend a fence, or how many times you try… it won’t. It is the wrong category of solution to the problem. This is why that which is absurd is unstable. I would further argue that the more absurd people become the more tension is built up. A potential energy that is released once the tension released explosively snaps reality back.
Voltaire said, “Absurdity leads to atrocity.” History has all but proven him right, or at least hasn’t falsified his conjecture. When a people are convinced of an absurdity, as was the case in the Soviet Union according to Solzhenitsyn, that absurdity led to the atrocity of the Gulags. The Nazis inculcated the absurdity that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot (according to Mein Kampf). That absurdity led to the Holocaust. Pol Pot spread the absurdity that if the Capitalist classes were exterminated, utopia would result. That absurdity led to the atrocity of the Killing Fields. History is unambiguous on this point. Voltaire was correct, absurdity does indeed lead inexorably to atrocity. Absurdity is a social contagion. It’s started by the leaders of society and spread through copying.
Confucius said people follow their leaders. Maybe a better way of understanding what he meant is to say people emulate their leaders. This is why if leaders blather absurdity, most will remain silent and won’t call it out, and some will parrot that absurdity. The more people that follow the leaders and claim absurdity is not only real but not to believe is a crime, the more people will be drawn along. Like a tsunami of opinion… you may not believe, but you had better say you do. Pretty soon you and everyone around you are saying Sieg Heil! and saluting. Not because you believe but because the social pressure is insurmountable for most people to stand against. So absurdity becomes normalized, then the categorical error… is applied to reality. This leads inevitably to atrocity, despotism, and social collapse.
Absurdity is started by an often well meaning elite. Social pressure then is the mechanism by which absurdity is spread. Once it reaches a critical potential, things break and atrocity emerges. Social collapse follows. That’s history in a nutshell. It’s not that people are bad, or that we want social collapse. The incentives are such that once an absurdity is accepted by the elite they spread it to society. The rest follows as cars trail behind a train engine. The answer then is to stop them from starting in the first place. They always start with some elites. Post modernism was started by intellectuals displeased Marxism failed. So now we have doctors in prestigious hospitals sterilizing brain washed children. Limiting the elite curtails their ability to inculcate absurdity as well.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
