Brilliant. Beautiful…
“…..Reality is a formidable opponent. It never loses. Sometimes the victory is immediate; in the political, cultural, and economic domains, it may take a while longer. In any human confrontation with the intractable facts of life, physical or historical, the outcome is never in doubt. Ignorance is a serious liability in any transaction with the real world. Denial is ultimately lethal.
The most succinct definition of reality I know of is the deceptively simple dictum of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides in his fragmentary poem “On the Order of Nature”: “Whatever is is!” Human error and ensuing catastrophe consist in the unfortunate propensity for believing that “things that are not are.”
Lies, like imaginary objects, are protean; they can shift, change, recompose. Reality is what is “unalterable”: 2+2=4, the Archimedes Principle, the gravitational law of inverse squares, the Coriolis Effect, Ohms Law, the force of entropy, and so on. One cannot violate or deny these facts with impunity. They simply are. The same is true of historical facts.
Socialism, then, is not only a political and economic system. It is a sign of the idealistic component in the human soul that can cut both ways – it can so easily go wrong – and, in its material manifestation, a palpable symptom of social decay.
Another word for this aberration is progressivism. The method it has adopted to achieve its goal is to abjure common sense – that is, the acknowledgement of psychological, biological, historical, and physical facts, and to substitute a series of phantoms that consort with desire, not reality. The repudiation of the reality principle and the pursuit of one’s own destruction are clearly a kind of insanity, the false idealism of profane perfectibility, self-hatred masking as self-love.
What we might call the leftist predisposition, the resentment of things as they are and the hunger for an Elysian mirage, will always be with us. But if we wish to survive and prosper, we have no choice but to respect the “unalterable form” of things as they are and to conserve what we have managed to accomplish thus far. To put it simply, we must work with, not against, reality….” The War Against Reality