When of one mind, Janus' views
form a composite of his two main sides. He attempts to consider issues with care and thoughtfulness, though he remains biased towards Christianity and Western
traditions. Outsiders might call him a Conservative, but in fact he is a Fundamentalist in that he promotes the Christian values that raised Western civilization to its peak.
One of the faces, looking to our right and called Patulcius, is the headstrong and determined side of Janus, tending to authoritarian ideals. Patulcius looks to history and upholds the traditions of
Christianity and Western civilization, and the well-being of Western nations. Patulcius sees world events as a struggle between divine and demonic
forces.
The other face—the easy-going, more open-minded, left-facing Clusivius—dislikes authority and prefers a more individualistic outlook. Clusivius looks to the future and contemplates changes. While
Christian, Clusivius takes an interest in the well-being of other civilizations as well as the Western. Clusivius tends to believe that elitist conspiracies play a major part in world events.
When possible, the complete Janus seeks to form a synthesis of the two sides when making a decision. At other times Janus allows any differences to stand without resolution. But now and again the two sides must battle one another until one side wins Janus' acceptance.
Tending to sensationalize, and sometimes to hyperbolize, C. F. van Niekerk over-analyzes any number of subjects from mundane minutiae to the great philosophical questions of life itself.
Katáxiros, the parched one, alone and adrift at sea, yet ever rowing ahead anyhow, sometimes weakly and sometimes vigorously, thirsting after God through the Orthodox Christian Church, contemplating the ways of the Lord, recognizing that while he is inadequate to the task, he must press ever ahead. Katáxiros writes about matters pertaining specifically to the Orthodox Church.
Barzillai Alpheus Bozarth claims to be a 19th Century man marooned in the 21st Century after a failed experiment in inter-dimensional travel. Not at all impressed with the wonders of our time, he would give just about anything to return to his beloved world of "horse manure and civilized etiquette". Barzillai writes historical observations and pores over old books and documents.
We don't know what to make of the Wanderer. He walks in with the moon and rolls out with the wind. He uses no name; the smells of rank sweat, dirt, and smoke mark him as much as anything. He's always near, but never close. Heedless of human ideals and bounds, he stands unyielding for honor on the ground. He's practical to a fault when he's not romantic to even greater fault. He says little, but when he does finally speak, we listen up. The Wanderer is our lawman of final resort. By hook or by crook, he sees a job done, just don't ask how. Frankly, we're a little afraid of the Wanderer.
Nature can be cruel to mankind.
If Concussus had his way, nature would be crueler yet. Concussus tends to arrive at the blackest of times, when humanity seems the most despicable.
Diabolus, the devil's advocate. Sometimes we are tempted to embrace the evil world that we despise. Diabolus is there to encourage us in this folly. Fortunately a rare visitor here.
– 16 June 2023 –
Janus:
The notion of a right to equality is bunk, and the idea that everyone is equal (even under the law) is observably preposterous. In the same way, the idea of a formal, existential right to liberty is equally absurd and observably false.
As long as more than one person exists, there is inequality. As long as two or more people exist, one will have more liberty than the other. If two castaways on an island should team up, one man will dominate the other in some way or other; if they live separately on the island, one man will show a greater capability than the other and will possess more liberty based on how much more freedom he can carve out of the drudgery of survival.
No Natural Right to Liberty
Liberty is earned, and liberty is won.
What right is there to liberty? Well, what right is there to respect from others? What right do we have to possess authority? There are no blanket, unfettered rights to liberty! We either earn our liberty from others, or we carve it out by ourselves, or God blesses us with some portion of it in unequal measure the same way He blesses us with most anything. Even the air we breathe and the water we drink is distributed across the world unequally.
It does seem to be true that people have a default measure of liberty to which we can claim a minimum “right” or societal expectation. Commonly this liberty is understood and upheld across a people as a cultural norm unless a particular man proves himself unworthy for even these commonly understood tokens of treatment, and then the people restrict him or reject him, if they have any sense anyway.
But in reality—and properly so—most liberty is earned, just as respect and authority are earned. And based on our conduct and capabilities, we can either gain more liberty, respect, and authority for ourselves, or even these privileges that are commonly understood by default can be taken away from us.
To the extent that a person has a common, default amount of liberty (or respect or assumed level of authority), he gains that liberty from the collective liberties that are earned or won by his aggregate peers in society, based on their demonstrated traits. And these peers, in turn, inherited their common levels of liberty and treatment from the characteristics and achievements of their ancestors.
Certainly this collective liberty amounts to a privilege, but it was earned by the people who maintain their culture and by the ancestors of these people, from those who built that culture and passed its benefits for their descendants. People like to criticize the idea of inherited privilege, saying that these benefits aren’t earned. This is a false, egalitarian lie, an attempt to trick people into giving up their power and freedom to those who in reality haven’t earned it. Inheritance is earned by the blood of our ancestors, consciously bequeathed by them to their descendants, and by the maintenance of our peers who respect (or ought to respect) the norms and benefits that they inherited. Liberty and power and respect are built and sustained across generations, just as they can be squandered and thrown away by worthless descendants who don’t remember the blood and sacrifice of where their people came from.
So to claim any commonly understood rights, someone has to belong to a people that has earned them and won them, and continues to earn them and uphold them. A people can generously extend some of these privileges to outsiders, but these are guests. When guests make demands of their hosts, attempting to take liberties with the hosts’ generosity, a healthy people will eject these ungrateful swine back into the sewers from which they crawled.
God Grants Liberties Unequally
It’s also true that God has written into nature and humanity certain moral truths from which we can’t (and shouldn’t want to) escape.
To the extent that we have any universal liberty at all, we are free through God’s grace.
God has given us the liberty to have a free will and (within the many confines and limitations of our abilities) to freely act on that will. What good is liberty and freedom if we aren’t allowed to reject God’s will and His laws? God never wanted us to be automatons.
God has allowed us to willingly break His moral laws. For instance, our liberty violates God’s order whenever we steal from others (and especially if we steal someone’s life through murder) in order to serve our own egos and wanton interests. Our liberty also violates God’s order when we live in self-absorbed idleness, when we lie, and when we live according to our lusts and vanities, whenever we sin against Him. Yet He certainly allows us to do these things, even though He will later judge us for it.
To give us even greater freedom of will, and presumably to better test us for His purposes, God even delays the consequences when we violate His will and His moral laws. In fact, the short-term violations often seem pleasurable and sweet (as they pervert natural traits that God gave us for our survival), with the negative consequences piling on afterwards and only gradually. If God inflicted our punishments for violating His will and His laws swiftly and immediately and proportionally, then obviously we would always choose to stay in line. But then we would still amount to automatons, not really making our own choices.
So He gives each of us great liberty of will, even while granting to some a little more willfulness than others. And then, though our wills are very free, He limits the range in which our wills can act. He locks our wills in a series of boxes, some by His express design, some by the works of others, and some by the works of ourselves. The range in which our wills are free to act out is the very definition of our liberties.
God doesn’t grant us liberty equally. He doesn’t grant us much of anything equally! He gives us (inherently and environmentally) different measures of personality, abilities, talents, responsibilities, limitations, and conditions. These traits vary individually, and they vary collectively. It’s just the same with our liberties. Our range of liberties varies from one person to another, from one nation to another, and from one point in time to another in our lives or our nation’s lives.
Additional Limitations on Our Natural Liberties
Yet our liberty to act in accordance to our wills, free as we may be to try to act, is also limited by various additional factors. Our liberty trickles down, from God through His creation all the way to us, and in the process, our abilities to act and to make choices grow more restricted and more complicated.
First, God has created a world of hard physical laws and limitations that are expressed in an amazing diversity of terrain, climate, and flora and fauna. We are also limited by our own physical biology, and by the biology and environment wherever we may live. Natural disasters and bumper crops flow unevenly across the earth, benefiting some and scourging others. We must eat and drink and have shelter, and struggle to gain these things within hard natural reality, and this affects our liberties.
Second, we are mortal! In our need to survive, in our struggles with nature and in life, people are maimed, sickened, and killed. We typically try to avoid these things, but these are all conditions we must navigate, and this severely hampers our range of action.
Third, we must interact with other remarkably varied (and unequal) people, and those interactions are further complicated by the fact that we are designed as social creatures, forming families and communities and tribes and nations. Each individual interacts willfully with another, affecting the abilities of others to act according to their wills. Collectively, groups of people establish rules and laws, some with greater liberty and some with less, and each collective layer adds their own set of restrictions, affecting overall liberty. And if people collectively grant a measure of default minimum liberty to an individual, they also collectively regulate a default maximum liberty; people are very jealous of their liberties! In the end, individually and collectively, we are born into an evolving kaleidoscope of human-directed restrictions and liberties.
Fourth, we don’t merely exist in unchanging conditions, but time affects everything. We start as babies and children, greatly reduced in our liberties for the sake of our needs, and affecting the liberties of our parents and extended families. We may have spouses and children, or we may not, but each of these choices (if we had the choice!) affects our liberties. Then we grow old, and our liberties diminish again as our bodies grow weak and sick and sterile. We rise and we fall in both power and liberty.
One generation leads to the next, inheriting the consequences of the choices and conditions of previous generation and then passing their own consequences to the next. All of this affects our liberties, giving us more or less freedom in a myriad of different expressions.
Fifth, we are limited by our own personalities, of which there is so much variety! And our inborn personalities are grossly affected by the people who raised us and the events of our lives. None of us is fully equal to any other, and some have a greater ability to make choices in life than others merely based on personalities and upbringing that we can barely control.
Spiritual War
Lastly, and perhaps most significantly with regard to social and political ideology, there are hard spiritual realities that play into this complicated and ever-shifting formula of human liberty. A spiritual war is raging. One aspect of this war is that mankind has inherited a curse in spirit and in body that cripples our abilities to function cohesively, both individually and collectively. Given the choice, sick and fallen humanity will all too often choose to harm others and ourselves, spreading disorder and death across the world. Left to our own devices, we are slaves to our vices and egos and wickedness.
The Lord Jesus Christ provided a means for humanity to rise above this sickness and death, but He hasn’t violated our fallen wills. He still wants us to make our own choices, and He respects our abilities to do so, again both individually and collectively, even when we choose to reject Him and embrace evil.
Nor is the devil idle. The serpent still interacts with us, still throws wicked temptations and manipulations into our minds and into the minds of those who influence us, and he still wants to callously use humanity to fight against God. Just as there are people who earnestly make progress in becoming like our Lord Jesus Christ, there are people who earnestly make progress in serving the will of Satan.
All of these things are largely beyond our control. These conditions affect and limit whatever “natural rights” we may have to “life, liberty, and property.” These conditions so limit whatever natural liberty manages to trickle down that it’s absurd to make any assertion that we have any ideological rights to these things! They are given and taken away so easily and so often beyond our ability to control! It’s like saying we have a right to rain, a right to sunlight, or a right to the sea. “Life, liberty, and property” are even more finite and temporary than the fruits of the earth.
We Are All Broken
To enforce political and social ideological rights to liberty in a whole people, without regard to what we can handle responsibly, must potentially (and given enough time: inevitably) give us the choice to enslave ourselves to vice and spread harm and evil across the earth.
When you give liberty to a junkie, he will seek only to get his fix. When you unleash a criminal, he will use his freedom to commit crimes to violate others. And we are all inherently junkies and criminals, to one degree or another! When liberty is enshrined as an ideological right, it’s only a matter of time before that right is ideologically abused.
Political and social liberalism seemed beneficial when it was applied to a Christian people coasting on the legacies of their immediate ancestors who built strict, Christian kingdoms. Those early liberals could govern themselves, relatively speaking, if not quite as well as those subjects living under a Christian monarchy, then more or less in line with God’s order. But it was only a matter of time before this enshrined liberalism deteriorated into near universal social corruption to the point where the people have now become ungovernable except through tyranny.
Conclusion
Satan and his servants have used ideological liberty to depose Christian monarchies that built up a massive inheritance of respect, authority, and liberty. Over the past several centuries, Satanic powers have unleashed one ideological delusion after another, each playing its part to poison the soil of our inheritance. Ultimately, ideological liberty—also known as liberalism—was a coup d’état against Christiandom in order to interfere with our salvation by Jesus Christ.
In a sane and balanced system of governance, both by formal rule and informal norms, people are granted liberty on the basis of their demonstrated responsibilities, just as they are granted respect on the basis of their demonstrated morality and honor. When people fail to demonstrate these traits, those in charge must collectively restrict the peoples’ liberties. This is simple common sense!
We all inherit a measure of liberty that trickles down from God through nature and humanity. From this small measure, liberty is built and won, and liberty is earned, all to be extended or taken away based on our responsibility and according to the mercies and purposes of God.
He have no real inherent right to this.
FINES ET INITIA 
2 Comments