When Words Are Idolized, Who Is Sacrificed?

How heresy and heterodoxy are bad, actually.

One of the great frustrations and derangements of our age — an all-too-perfect illustration of how attempts to save ourselves from ourselves drive us deeper into trouble — concerns the attempt to escape the “divisiveness” of theological disputes by translating them into language meant to be merely “political”.

Swiftly enough a contradiction emerges where “mere” politics is understood and construed as actually superior to theology and religion because it transcends them; the lower becomes alchemically higher, and the low — not just in politics! — elevated to its highest intensity or totality becomes the new measure of value and purpose, rather than the divine ascent, through repentance and suffering, from alienation from God to reunion with Him.

“BEYOND” POLITICS

Of course this does a disservice to politics itself. Even a debased understanding that holds war to be politics by other means is discarded in favor of the new idea that the war of words, which results inevitably from their idolization as an improvement on religious conflict, is a transcendent improvement on politics itself. The benighted weigh us down and hold us back tying themselves to the foolish sentimentalism of any politics as such, especially one wherein we must wait for people and peoples to haggle their way toward one provisional “agreement” after another; the enlightened reduce politics to a foolish sentimentalism for plebs, a simulacrum of words established by wordmasters who conduct their true business, the cosmic conflict of abstractions and symbols, at a vast and permanent remove.

In case you hadn’t noticed, this legerdemain more or less conceals that the nature of the transcendence of the political by and through the linguistic is nothing other than “spiritual” — an effort not to replace religious and theological conflict with something “secular” but with a different jihad, a new religion, a “higher god.”

You might think I’m exaggerating, and maybe I am but not by design. Among today’s most painful spectacles is the sight of some of our evidently most earnest defenders of freedom and liberty falling most deeply prey to the temptation to idolize the words of men — and to offer human sacrifices in the performance of their idolatry.

WHAT DISCOURSE SILENCES

It’s a tell that so much freedom-and-liberty discourse today is so sharply limited in its concept of freedom and liberty to the freedom to discourse. This quite partial freedom, presenting itself as a whole, reduces with cartoonish speed and regularity to the freedom of the most intelligent to discourse separately and together in contravention of any authority they choose. Which authority they “choose” to contravene ends up not much of a choice at all, but rather the immediate logical conclusion of their actual premise.

The tell here is their great dependence, in the mode of rhetorical combat they employ to justify themselves, on the language of heresy and heterodoxy. Everything, we are told, all we hold dear, hinges entirely on the bravery of smart people willing and able to go linguistic war against “heterodoxy” — people willing and able to be true “heretics”. Notice the sleight of hand: the true orthodoxy, we are discoursed into sensing, is merely conventional discourse itself, as opposed to, say, the holy wisdom and doctrine of Christ’s own Church. See? Today’s heretics slaying orthodoxies are heroes forever toiling to break us free of the smothering idiocies of “consensus”, of “received opinion”, which really is, as any fool can see — even fools-for-democracy! — entirely foolish and without authority.

The real authority, the real orthodoxy, of right doctrine in theological matters spiritual and religious, has been magically disappeared, the better to kill with one stone two troublesome birds: one, the “free speech” of the unbroken millennia of holy saints, martyrs, priests, etc., openly testifying and living out the firmly exoteric teaching of the Lord and His Apostles — a speech the effectual suppression unto forgetfulness of which destroys the foundation and possibility of speech which is not only free but fruitful and saving; two, the inconvenient truth, requiring its own suppression, that the brave “heretics” of “heterodoxy” are not simply spreading the disenchanted enlightenment afforded by secular facts but are waging a spiritual war of their own religion against others — specifically and foundationally against one in particular, that of the Christ.

WHOSE NIGHTMARE?

To repeat, you might think I’m exaggerating, but read along here about “the infantilism of totalitarianism”:

We need to stop countering the new censors by accusing them of exaggerating the power and the potency of words. We need to stop responding to their painting of speech as a dangerous, disorientating force by defensively pleading that words don’t wound because they’re just words. We need to stop reacting to their branding of speech as a weapon, as a tool of ambush and degradation, by effectively draining speech of its power and saying: “It’s only speech.” As if speech were a small thing, almost an insignificant thing, more likely to contain calming qualities than upsetting ones, more likely to help us overcome conflict rather than stir it up, more likely to offer a balm to your soul than to stab at it as a knife might stab at your body.

For when we do this, we play down the power of words. And that includes the power of words to wound. Words do wound. It’s true. Words hurt people, they hurt institutions, they hurt belief systems. Words make churches tremble and ideologies quake. Words inflict pain on priests and princes and ideologues. Words upend the social order. Words rip away the comforting ideas people and communities might have wrapped themselves in for decades, centuries perhaps. Words ambush the complacent and degrade the powerful. Words cause discord, angst, even conflict. Isn’t every revolution in history the offspring of words? Of ideas? Words do destabilize, they do disorientate. People are right to sometimes feel afraid of words. Words are dangerous. When they say words wound, we should say: “I agree.”

But here’s the thing: it is precisely because words can wound, precisely because of their power to unsettle, that they should never be restricted. It is precisely the unpredictable energy and influence of speech that means it must be put beyond the jurisdiction of all earthly authorities. Because nothing that empowers the individual to such an extent that it allows him to sow and spread ideas that might one day change society for the better should ever be constricted. They say the power of speech justifies its censure and control. We should say the opposite: the fact that speech is powerful is all the justification we need to let it be free, everywhere and always.

What a nightmare that this is being laid out and laid on us as a spiritual cure — the only possible spiritual cure — for the distinct but (actually) not unrelated monstrosity of officialized speech coming from the pink police borg or whatever you’d like to name the Legion that is our regime:

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta-Facebook-Instagram says he wants his new Threads app to be a more positive alternative to Twitter. "We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place," Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.

In practice, that’s meant creating secret blacklists to censor disfavored users and selling your personal “Health & Fitness," "Financial," and "Sensitive" data to the world’s largest corporations and, perhaps, the military-industrial complex.

Some amount of censorship, or “content moderation,” is inevitable, but what Zuckerberg is doing is positively Orwellian.

It is not in the name of oppression that the totalitarians come but rather in the name of kindness. This is censorship with a smile.

True! But at what cost have we allowed ourselves to believe that the best or only way to understand what kinds of misrule oppress us is in reference to Orwell or indeed any combination of Anglo discoursers, so many of whom have fallen so many times into varying degrees of idolatry toward the mortal word?

MIRROR IDOLS

Contrary to presentation smart people saying whatever they want independently and together is not the opposite or antidote to the regime imposing speech codes. Rather than cosmic opposites they are twins of a sort that tend to, but only tend to, see one another as the evil one. Of course as we all know a “smart enough” person can quietly (or not!) hold both idols in mind at the same time, theirs and the regime’s, and play with or oscillate between them more or less at will, as back-of-napkin (or bowel-of-server) calculations regarding their relative advantage would seem to recommend.

There is in other words a “mimetic rivalry” here, one familiar enough — although hardly to the point of boredom — to none less than the Ape of God. These mirror idols, and the intelligentsia’s aptness to use them as two different ladders, one for each foot, are all too easy to see reflected in the ever-transcending strategies of the masters of Anglo Dolls.

What Threads is doing, within the four corners of the matter decried above, is simply to play its assigned cofounding part, following the humiliation and breaking of Zuck post-2016, to establish the regime’s truly heretical doctrine in truly heterodox service of its false and unholy rival god.

Censorship with a smile? Yes, but worse, much worse than that — in a manner which the all-too-literally heretical heterodox would love nothing more than, well, to censor.