I come to it, at last, I come to the point of knowing only two things. It is fascinating how simplistically complex it all is in the final analysis. What beauty we find in the intricacy of it all. What terror we perceive in many of the resulting implications.

 

Bear with me for a moment,  as it might be easy to confuse the words I am about to write with those of an existentialist or even a nihilist, Drink in my whole meaning before passing judgment.

 

I suspect I have become convinced that there is nothing we can reasonably claim to know about anything, with but a few exceptions. We can know that there are truths, universals, axioms, and general laws that hold true. Humans may argue that these exist, if they apply universally and always and what these consist of, but I can say that I know that I know these exist – this is the only thing I know.

 

And, because it seems impossible that a human can live without a worldview, without a way to order and explain the world to himself if no one else, I, like everyone else have settled on what I hold as truth related to the universals, axioms and general laws that govern us.

 

I could, and often have, made arguments in support of my presuppositional worldview and others do the same for theirs. That these arguments occur does not mean the answer is subjective, it merely means when vast differences occur one or both arguments are wrong.

 

I have come to my understanding of the universe, the cosmos, the metaverse to use the term as it once applied to fantasy gaming, not by accepting the words of others, but by testing the words against reason and against other theories. I have come to know it as truth, because one of the most foundational truths I believe I know is that a man has to know such truths for anything to make sense. This then is the second thing I know, a thing I would give up my life for rather than deny, it is just that foundational.

 

Beyond this, I know that we cannot even know truth based upon observation, not always. Experience and observation can very often prove very poor data inputs that we use to synthesize knowledge. Our hearts deceive us, more than other humans, and our hearts and emotions are always there tainting the interpretation of every piece of information we digest.  We can extrapolate the implications of that, if we cannot always trust ourselves, we certainly cannot always trust other humans.

 

In the worldview I hold as truth, I know, because I can know no other, that man is fallen, flawed and broken. Separated from the source of truth. I am not the only person to know this as a fact, but many that know it fail to apply this knowledge. This brokenness, the separation, it affects everything, has affected everything and will affect everything. Every idea, institution, organization, movement and trend in all of past, present and future history. My worldview tells me that evil exists, but it also tells me that the dark and foreboding sort of evil we conjure up for horror movies is not the only sort. There is the ordinary kind that lives in and among us all, the general law related to human nature encompasses this mundane, ordinary and ubiquitous evil.

 

One needs nothing more than an understanding of the general law of human nature and a worldview that explains that truths exist to understand all of human history. None of it is either a mystery or a surprise when viewed through such a lens. That at various times men come together to conspire to seek power and deceive, that they weave strange ideas into the fabric of men’s minds, this too is not surprising. It is, however, predictable and required, considering the true nature of our existence.

 

Likewise, one ought not be surprised at all when strange and absurd ideas about ultimate truth and the nature of man cease to be fanciful notions on the margins and are accepted in the whole that the trends we see in history become accelerated. Those that conspire and plot in the shadows have always been parasites in the human mind. They have only had great success in those peoples of history where the collective body of society, in general, was ill. In the times and places when sufficient numbers of men abandoned right thinking based upon universals, a sickness befell the land.

 

I suspect that the minds of men have never been as poisoned, not in the whole, as we now find in the West, in America. It is not merely those of your political opponents I speak. I suspect, because I hear the words and see the deeds over and over that say it must be true, that many who believe they hold a counter view, one that aligns with something of the traditional, that these too are sick in mind and spirit; confused as to what ultimate truth is and just as importantly, how that ought to impact us each day.

 

If my suspicion is correct, if my observations are not poisoned by my own lying heart then there are other implications we can reason out that might also be true. If men of ill intent have always taken advantage of people when they were most vulnerable, lying to them and deceiving them for the purposes of the deceivers, and, if we admit, that technological advances certainly make mass deception more feasible we have to ask something about what we know of events in the world. How can we be certain that anything we believe we know, any strongly held opinion about any issue, no matter the side we take, how can we know that our opinions are correct?

 

In short, we cannot. We cannot trust either the mainstream media nor alternative sources. We cannot trust our government nor foreign nations. We cannot trust institutions. We cannot trust our heroes because we cannot be certain how much they have been affected by all of the entities I just listed.

 

We are left with, only knowledge of universals, some general laws we can extrapolate from that, and then some knowledge of the nature of things. We can know something about the nature of power and money, because the general law of human nature tells us about it. We can know that liars cannot be trusted and if it is the nature of an entity to lie, we would do well to either dismiss or test every word they utter.  We can detect much of the nature of the ideas that comprise worldviews that are diametrically opposed to the universals we hold as truth. We can even often, but not always, detect when someone that believes they hold a world view based upon the same universals as us expresses ideas that come from that other, unrelated universe.

 

But even if I believe I might be able to know, I cannot be certain, I cannot prove it. I can not state with certainty that this time we live in is not “just a moment” and not a transformative period unlike any other. I may believe I know that the prevailing worldview that now appears to be embedded in all of public life and all of our institutions is wholly inadequate for its stated purpose.  But, I cannot prove that it is wrong and incapable of solving any of the problems we face. I cannot prove it, but I can frame some good questions that those enamored with the various ideologies that spawn from that view must answer. I know that comparing history and general laws of human nature it seems unlikely this system, this way of ordering truth and reality that has become the defacto norm can solve any problems, and will likely cause many more – but I cannot prove it.

 

I suspect that, if this is a transformative time, the sort I have pontificated about so often in my scribblings over the years there will be people long after I am dead, who argue that it never occurred. That seems to be the very nature of the ascendant worldview, the denial of and recrafting of truth.

 

I certainly probably erred on the side of certitude, beginning in early 2020, proclaiming my belief that it was not all just a moment, and just as has happened in history in many documentable occasions, transformations do occur. If I was so certain in my conclusions that my words fell silent on the ears I truly intended for, that was my own failing. It seemed that the time for subtlety had come and gone, and although I may have been correct in that assumption, the reality of that fact was not powerful enough to counterbalance the weight of the various narratives that swept so many away further along the path of fully accepting key tenets of the alien worldview that now reigns supreme.

 

In the end, I was left with nothing but a curmudgeon’s persona, one that does not reflect my disposition in life most of the time on most days. I wrote about serious topics, about lies and the liars that tell them and the consequences. I wrote about the murder of decency, of reason, the decapitation of truth. If a person does not equivocate, if they do not deny the undeniable and if they face those issues head-on, and then watch a slow-rolling tide cover the land, it is hard not to manifest something of the curmudgeon in written words.

 

If you remove false hope, and truly comprehend the degree of deception, the willingness of so many to believe any lie that appeals to their emotions, and the absolute nefarious nature of the underlying ideologies; these ideas that make a bastard of truth and an exile of truth-tellers what is left?  A person could claim that this will pass, and it might be said that this is all in God’s hands, and both of these might be true, the later is certainly true. Does that remove the sadness a person ought to feel at the loss of something important? Does it make the emotion of disgust and anger at the masses of people willingly stumbling, and generally confused into an unknown that is perhaps knowable to them if they but pondered it all from a right-reasoned position?

 

I was slow to understand how powerless a right-reasoned approach to understanding truth was. In early 2020 it amazed me that people could embrace the idea of spreading racialism under the flawed notion this could help humanity. The words and actions of a lot of people that thought they were joining the “right side of history” did much harm. And then there was the cult, there was no chance to talk sense into people that pledged their allegiance to a letter of the alphabet and made a man their hero. Likewise, it was pointless to talk to people that consumed the stories that the media paints for them, on either side of the dialectic, and suggest that all of it was designed to deceive.

 

But three events summarize it all for me, educating me into the folly of suggesting that our reality is anything other than what people want to believe. The ubiquitous way in which the majority in the West settled on one narrative concerning Ukraine was more telling to me than the way so many had previously moved from one ‘good guy” cause to the next. Noble lies, told well and often are very effective, particularly in our age. The second was something that will pass quieter, but it consists of part of the government telling the world, without shame that they own the information space and all narratives. Few will ever notice or consider it or what it really means.

 

I cannot prove to most people that there has been a plan to subvert institutions and ideas that has gone on for a long time. Sure, we could look at various efforts of man and see the fruits of it, and sometimes find men writing down the methodology and occasionally coming together to conspire for power and influence, riding the destructive wave. These are all mere symptoms, the parasites that can only live in an ill body, in our case one that has abandoned truth. The thing is, you do not need an academic argument to prove that the efforts of folks in the Frankfurt School were not really unrelated to the efforts of those that watered-down Christian theology, to the founders of the megachurch movement, to political ideologies and so much more. We do not need a conspiracy theorist to draw lines to all these efforts, and while lines may sometimes exist, that is not the point. Something else has connected various efforts in the West, going back centuries, to bring us to the point that all of the permanent things that built and protected The West are now impotent and forgotten. When people use the Whiggish term “right side of history” they unwittingly, in most cases, are talking about the arc of history that has emphasized secular ideas divorced from ultimate truth. I cannot prove it all, I cannot say I know I am right; but I am pretty certain I am.

 

A post-truth age will be unkind to those that seek to apply universal and philosophic truth. And frankly, Robert D. Raiford and Andy Rooney were humorous, but the situation is now too serious to really tolerate a curmudgeon. The irony that my website renewal comes due, just at the point in time that I assess my words as useless is not lost on me – perhaps that is as it should be.

 

But I could not help but write some final final words – it is difficult to mourn the loss of something so important. History may continue, man may trudge on, but I believe I am right in the observation that we are witnessing the death of a thing that built and sustained us. What replaces it appears ill equipped to provide, justice, peace, happiness or truth.

 

The difference between proof and knowing. We can all think of examples that explain the difference, but fundamentally, proving requires argumentation. Argumentation requires a common way of talking and thinking. It requires one to use words, to piece together facts and data and organize that as knowledge in such a way that convinces someone else. But the current ascendant worldview is based upon philosophies that were by nature non-rational and post truth. Argumentation often devolves into rhetorical tricks, sophistry and logical fallacies. Proving anything to someone that holds the ascendant worldview is often impossible.

 

But despite what I said above about what we can know, we seem equipped to know much more than we might assume. There are two things to consider. Only those that hold to something of the old-world view, that rational outlook that is based upon realism and acknowledges objective truth, are truly capable of “knowing” anything that is true about our world.  The parasites that prey upon the ill state of our culture know this well and seem prepared for it. For every rational thinker that wakes up one day and notices that the world is fundamentally not as it should be there are twelve alternative channels and voices standing by to provide them with a new version of the deception, tailor-made for those that almost took Morpheus’ offer.

 

It is not exceptionally difficult to know all the fundamental things a person ought to know about the world. But it is exceedingly difficult to prove that knowledge to anyone, and it is increasingly complicated to rely upon others waking up and not being swooped up by the waiting charlatans poised to provide them with a deceptive explanation that soothes the soul.

 

I thought that my website expired on 22 October, but I received a notification that some payment is due by 7 Jun. I am not renewing. Perhaps the entire thing goes down in a few days. My wife threatened to figure out how to call and pay them, I am not certain if she is a fan or afraid I will talk to her about all this if I do not write it down.

 

But here are the facts. All of the good books that I read in my life, I have read, new ones seem to get filtered through those. I repeat myself now, I understand the history of how this happened, I understand culture, politics and geopolitics and philosophic truths…But I repeat myself, often, because the problem and the diagnosis do not change, we are simply provided additional proofs as time progresses. And frankly, my self-diagnosed dyslexia seems to be getting worse, my common typos are cringe-worthy to me. That is a poor excuse, I worked for a fellow once that had a Ph.D., a law degree, and was an Episcopal priest, he made do with his dyslexia.

 

Perhaps most importantly I can identify and diagnose the problem, but I have no solution. I am a firm believer that some problems are too large for a human solution. I cannot know that we are incapable of solving this, I suspect I know, but I do not know. I have said my words, and identified the problem as it really is in its simplicity and complexity, but I have no solution – at least not a solution that we could convince enough people to try….

 

My final final words.  Find a relationship with the Creator of it all, the instructions are in His revealed Word. Love those around you, ignore liars and lies from all sides and don’t be afraid.

 

And painfully, I have to say this, I have said it millions of times. The primary target of truth is now and always has been universal truth and any institution developed to propagate understanding of universal truth. The visible church has moved far beyond containing differences of opinion, and different error essentially, and is more and more embracing something fundamental of a flawed ideology. Find the truth, but be ever so wary my friends, be wary.

 

These are the times that try men's souls....this then is it, the last thing I will publically write. If you know what you know about real truth, be happy in that knowledge, live a good and happy life, do your duty, do the right thing, spend some time on your knees and let all the rest go.  I do not know if all my scribblings go into the ether this week or in October, it was, well it was fun, and I hope it had a purpose. Thanks and Godspeed!