Boundaries Part IV - And Then There's Us

Back to Part III - The Characteristic of Boundarylessness

That’s the story of humanity. We don’t want the boundaries to exist, so we pretend they don’t. It’s resulted in us being mirthless, psychotic, violent, and self-deluded.
And now having written three posts on that by way of background, we've established a solid enough footing that I, a 21^st century man of the west, can show how this model explains our recent history and current predicament.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, ‘See, this is new?’ it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

In the mid 1800’s evolution gained enormous popularity as a brilliant solution to our boundary problem. What began as an observation of bio-diversity and the fragmentation of life due to death immediately became the antidote for God’s created boundaries. People were hungry to eradicate the lines and the theory of evolution offered a powerful tool to enable them to do so. Now at last there was no distinction between life and non-life, plants and animals: all things were in flux of becoming something else. Given enough time water will turn into a reptile and crawl upon the land. Give it more time and it will become a man, or even a god. 

In the late 1800s it became popular to put our hopes in a man without a conscience, a superman, someone able to do the heavy lifting necessary to create utopia for us. (See for example the book Crime and Punishment.) Unconstrained by conventional morality, the great man would break down the boundaries and achieve greatness for us, standing as living proof that boundaries could indeed be moved. 

In the early 1930s the movement of creating this superman with new morals and unlimited physical potential reached a fever pitch in Nazi Germany. At the same time Russian communists were busy building their own society without a number of the traditional boundaries, leading to a rejection of the capitalistic division of labor and the appointment of Trofim Lysenko to chief scientist. (Lysenko believed in inherited characteristics, that a man could lift weights, bulk up, have a kid, and the son would inherit incredible strength. It too is a complete denial of the created order, and unsurprisingly it didn’t pan out.) These societies share the common assumption that the best way to establish pantheism was through a top down approach. Unsurprisingly, the societies they created to fight against the boundaries were cruel, humorless, violent affairs that couldn’t be sustained.

We in the west sat that movement out, but since Christianity has waned we’ve decided to throw our hat into the ring and give banishing the evidence of God from existence a try. But whereas their modernistic notion of imposing a top down removal of the boundaries was a proven failure, ours is a post-modern, bottom up approach to pantheism. Sure we’re following in their footsteps of trying to get God gone, but this time we’re driving at it via democracy rather than oligarchy. With the mob rather than with the tyrant.

“For the heart of this people has become dull, with their ears they scarcely hear, and their have closed their eyes, otherwise they would see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and return, and I would heal them.”

Today we are broadly characterized by two political groups: the right and the left. The left thinks the right is a bunch of cruel hypocrites who have no regard for the well-being of their fellow man, while the right thinks the left is made up of bunch of brain damaged lunatics who are completely out of touch with reality. The left is trendy, controls the media, the arts, and places of learning, because those are key to shaping a worldview and culture. The right controls finance, business, and certain legacy industries because they’re more practical and therefore more successful. The left believe the best thing for society is to progress as quickly possible, while the right believes we should be cautious lest we carelessly make things worse.

Now I’m not being misleading or hyperbolic, this is actually what they think. It’s not a slur one gives to the other to demonize them, the man on the left really believes the right is evil, and the right really believes the left is crazy. Why? Given what I’ve said earlier about boundaries it should be evident.

The progressive movement is passionately committed to taking the boundaries down right now. (They’re the kind of people who prefer do a cannon ball when getting into a cold pool.) As such, they’re characterized exactly as you’d expect.
Their comedy routines are sanctioned and approved, which means they’re neither funny nor insightful.
They have become deluded into thinking fathers bear children, men can be mothers, and the deciding factor between a mother or father is in the mind. They believe the difference between a child in the womb and parasitic strand of DNA lies in whether or not the baby is wanted. They believe a gay marriage and a straight marriage are identical, because it’s the words and feelings that matter. They believe the Earth is warming, that everyone should have the right to free stuff like money and healthcare, and in the dangers of genetically modified foods.
They’re angry against the right because they believe them a hindrance to fixing the boundaries. In fact, so long as the right exists, so long as the boy laughs at the emperor’s new clothes, they will be unhappy and will do everything they can to ensure doctrinal uniformity to their religion, which they call science. Even if it means fining people they disagree with, silencing them, or putting them in jail. What matters is the power to create uniformity, because it’s only through unified belief that the boundaries can be denied, and therefore, undone.

The conservatives on the other hand are only somewhat committed to taking down the boundaries, being people who prefer to get in cold water one step at a time. As a rule they’re more individualistic, more libertarian, and believe things shouldn’t change too fast, lest we slide down a slippery slope we can’t get back from. They believe science is made up of observational and repeatable phenomena, but also acknowledge the creative power of evolution. They believe some criminals can’t be cured and should instead be disposed of, socialist states fail because they run out of other people’s money, and using Earths natural resources is a good thing. They distrust wild animals, cults, other people, and see in the left’s vision casting a return to poverty and tyranny. But for all their talk of individual freedom they adapt well to a changing culture and continue on about their business of making a living, because pantheism is where they’re also going; deep down they feel alright about it, they just tend to feel uncomfortable about using the express lane to arrive too early.

Together these groups make up about 88% percent of the population. The remaining 12% are Christians, a conspicuous group that always seems to be walking around yelling “stop” to everyone, and reminding them of the God they don’t want to hear about. They believe in tearing down exactly zero boundaries, reject pantheism completely, and think man is fatally and irreparably flawed, unfit to be worshiped as God.

And that’s where things are today. That’s why news of abuse for Christians should be absolutely no surprise to anyone. Neither should it surprise us when the next mega-welfare program is being proposed by the left (and not because they want to gather for themselves enough government power to reestablish the Soviet gulag, but because it attacks a created boundary). This is why the right always folds in a political debate, and why the left is clever in their innovation and steadfast in its refusal to compromise . The left is doing its level best to bring in the pantheism which they hope will allow them to push God away, the right supports this goal but wants to move cautiously. On the fringes are the Christians who have two hands on the door-frame, holding on for dear life.

In the last post, I’ll tackle where we go from here.

Continue to Part V