Tuesday, 12 July 2016

Nothing is random - everything is connected. The only proper question is how?

Pseudo-sophisticated modern mainstream intellectuals like to regard everything as random unless 'proven' otherwise - except that it can never be proven otherwise, so that in practice everything is regarded as random except what power states is causal.

In reality (as all humans know spontaneously - such a perspective is built-in), nothing is random, everything is purposive and connected - but usually we do not know the detailed and specific purpose of the causal connections, and nearly-always judgment is required.

The mass media work by fragmentation of knowledge into pieces so small and cut-off that individually considered they are indeed meaningless and acausal - more observations; but adding them together to make sense of them is ridiculed as 'conspiracy theory'.

In other words - the dominant ideology is 'no-conspiracy theory'. This is extremely dangerous when there actually is a conspiracy, and it is extremely powerful.

All Christians need to acknowledge the reality of a world conspiracy of evil - the only legitimate disagreements concerns specific questions of scope and effectiveness - but that there is a global and powerful satanic, demonic conspiracy working through men and by supernatural means is woven-into Christianity. In a world of globalist secular power it would indeed be amazing if the evil conspiracy did not at least attempt to influence and control those people with greatest power - and this is what we find.

The situation is that there are clear intentions, patterns, trends at work at the highest levels of power in the world, and these are very easy to make sense of on the assumption of being a consequence of supernatural evil influence... or, at least, that would be the case if the intellectual elite had not been so widely and comprehensively nullified by several generations of Leftist nihilism. As it is, the majority of powerful, high status, educationally-credentialed people are enslaved by metaphysical assumptions that are incoherent and deluded; so their opinions are worthless at best but most often indirect tools of evil.

So the situation is that it is very clear and obvious what is going-on in the world, where the international leadership are tending and trending - there is a vast and detailed mass of evidence at every level including (most importantly) the level of direct personal experience and knowledge... yet this is denied by assumption: it is denied by saying that it cannot be true - the fact that it cannot be true is assumed, and the task is merely to explain-away the evidence.

For a Christian who accepts the Christian teaching of spiritual warfare the situation is amazing! We live inside a battlefield, in which many of the most powerful participants are denying that there is any battle... but only a sequence of unrelated but well-meaning mistakes and random occurrences!

Indeed, the liberal Christian response to the situation is to assert that the only Christian attitude is to regard all powerful people and organizations as well-intentioned by default! It is assumed (not argued) that it is ridiculous to assert that organizations - especially global ones - might actually be aiming to destroy good things on-purpose... even though they keep doing so over and again and everywhere!

(Note - a brief definition of evil is the strategic intent to destroy the good - so the destruction of virtues such as chastity and of virtuous institutions such as marriage and the family, the inversion of standards of beauty, and the subversion of truth - are all clear and objective examples of evil. All evil is mixed with good, because it works in the context of God's creation - but the intent to do evil is straightforward even though it always entails doing some lesser good as a by-product.)

The idea that there is a powerful and highly influential conspiracy to do evil is ruled-out in advance - not least because the reality of supernatural evil is ruled-out in advance.  

The hope lies among those people who have retained the spontaneous common sense attitude that - overall and in the long run - things happen on purpose; and have this common sense attitude embedded in the common sense context of religion.

The good side is religious; and all religions are truer and better than no religion, because no religion is simply a path to nihilism and despair - the only proper arena for debate is: which religion? That is the sub-conflict within the main spiritual war.

But the Western elites, and great masses of the populations they lead, have the rooted conviction that the acceptable answer is 'anything but Christianity' - and unless this assumption changes, that is indeed what they will get - in the medium term.

But if the powers of evil get what they want, then the longer term will be subversion and inversion of all religions including those which have been (consciously, deliberately) deployed as tools in the destruction of Christianity.


Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

It drives me crazy when people say that! Of course some things are random. For example: {69, 52, 38, 32, 12}, a set of integers I just produced using a truly-random number generator. And a great many things are "random" in the less technical sense of being meaningless coincidences -- such as the fact that the Sphinx of Giza looks a bit like Michael Jackson, or that "twelve plus one" is an anagram of "eleven plus two," or that Lenin was born on Queen Isabella's birthday.

Perhaps what you mean to say is that many more things are meaningfully connected than most people suppose, and that meaning rather than randomness should in many cases be our default assumption. But I don't see how anyone could plausibly maintain that nothing at all is random, that everything we can connect in our minds is in fact meaningfully connected.

Bruce Charlton said...

Random-number generators are not random in their operation. The only thing that is officially pseudo-random are quantum events, and even these are not truly random since they display statistical predictability.

Toddy Cat said...

"all religions are truer and better than no religion"

Aztecs? 70,000 people sacrificed at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan? I get what you mean, but I think that you're painting with too broad a brush, here.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Actually, I used a truly random (not pseudo-random) number generator, but that technical distinction is beside the point, since both are equally "random" in the layman's sense of being unpredictable and having no purpose or meaning, and it is in that sense that you deny that anything is random.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Wm - The only sense in which anything is truly random is when a segment of reality is artificially segregated from the rest of reality. A bit like entropy in reverse - order is used to 'create' randomness.

Either way, it is built into us at a metaphysical level that reality is purposive; and modernity does violence to this instinct because we cannot truly think otherwise (except in the above artificially constrained fashion - and even them only few can think that way).

This is one of the situations in which common sense gets it right, and modernity wrong. Modernity offers a choice between determination (with no agency/ freedom) and randomness. It is strange how people oscillate between these extremes, without being aware they are doing it, and without any apparent criteria for choosing which framework to apply in any specific instance.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Toddy - I was talking about better in terms of the ultimate purpose of Mortal Life. I suppose that the average day of the average person contained more suffering at most times in the past than it does now. But in an ultimate spiritual sense, I don't think any society of the past cam near to the modern West in terms of rejecting and inverting The Good - and (apparently) being persuaded that destruction of The Good is itself Good. It has become almost normal - and it is officially approved and enforced - to assert inverted morality (inversion of values most especially in the sexual realm - but also in terms of aesthetics, science, education and so on).

In this sense of having a valid understanding of values, any religion is better than no religion.

Misanthropist said...

The whole concept of 'conspiracy theory' as a knee jerk term of ridicule is something that ought to be self-evidently absurd. By definition, a conspiracy is simply a plan or strategy to influence certain events and with some attempt made to keep it from being fully exposed.

But who doesn't plan where significant interests are at stake, and try to keep those plans as much on a 'needs to know' basis as possible? 'Let's pull a few strings here and there, in order to get to the outcome we want'. No. Apparently powerful interests just sit back and let the cards fall as they may, and it is merely a happy coincidence when seemingly random and disconnected events work to the benefit of some powerful vested interest.

Alas, people have been programmed like Pavlov's dogs to immediately associate the mention of 'conspiracy theory' with paranoia and delusion. It is an effective means of social control and brainwashing. Anyone who sees a hidden hand or influence in events can be immediately dismissed as a nutter.

Samson J. said...


Today's post reminds me of the initial joy I used to feel at reading this blog. It sounds like such a very basic thing to say, and yet it comes as a shocking revelation for us really to realize it, that many of the things we feel intuitively but are "told" are impossible, are actually true!

Again, to return to the question from the other day asking what we have enjoyed most about the blog, I would reiterate that it re-kindled an adult appreciation for LotR - not just as a story, but as a mythos with applicability to our world. A post like this one reminds me of the fact that LotR is in fact "true"! It reminds me that just like events in LotR were never random, neither are they in our world.

And that gives me no end of hope.

Anonymous said...

"In this sense of having a valid understanding of values, any religion is better than no religion."

Richard Hooker saying in the Laws of Ecclesiatical Polity (I.ii.5), "They err therefore who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides his will", comes to mind. He seems to be addressing the real possibility of people self-consciously theologizing in some sense religiously while doing so so far amiss as to eclipse "having a valid understanding of values".

David Llewellyn Dodds