The Collapse of Distinction and the Collapse of Society

Will the destruction of the distinction between men and women be the ultimate act in the collapse of civilization?

The forgotten meaning of authority

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce described the concept of “authority” distinctively from the common, modern reading of that word:

First of all, we must distinguish authority from power: “the word ‘power’ almost inevitably evokes the idea of strength or force, and above all the idea of a material force, a force which manifests itself visibly and outwardly and affirms itself by the use of external means, for such means indeed characterize the temporal power by very definition. On the contrary, spiritual authority, interior in essence, is affirmed only by itself, independently of any sensible support … If we can speak in this context of strength or force, it is only by analogical transposition.…” What must be highlighted in this definition, which in my judgment is one of the most effective, besides the concept of “interiority” (because sharing the same values prevents the hierarchical relationship that characterizes authority from being identified with that between master and slave), is also the concept of “independence from any material support”. The question of authority is, in fact, the relationship between man and the invisible, the primacy of the invisible: this primacy can be found also in primitive societies, confirming that the metaphysics of being is immanent within “common sense” – which is itself a distinctive assertion of such metaphysics.

In other words, true authority is simply the highest truth that governs all men. It is not the power by one man to ensure another man does his bidding, as both men remain subject to the unwavering authority of the higher truth. Whether a man calls this higher authority the laws of nature, God, or whatever else he believes in, it exists upon him as an unavoidable limitation on his being. No amount of wealth, strength, or legions of soldiers will allow the powerful man to overcome the ultimate authority that truth holds over him.

Even the powerful man’s wielding of power over the poor man comes through this ultimate authority. He does not directly manipulate the poor man to do his bidding, he can only manipulate circumstances such that the poor man is compelled to recognize the powerful man’s earthly authority because what the powerful man would do if he refuses will be painful to him (or, what the powerful man would do if he complies will be pleasant to him). And to do this the wealthy man must recognize certain truths that are forever outside of his control. What motivates the poor man to comply are matters set indelibly by this ultimate authority. The powerful man may have the means to call forth factors that press on these motivations in the poor man, but he cannot do anything to change the fact that these, and nothing else, are the poor man’s motivations.

Del Noce suggests that societies fare better when their members recognize and agree on this authority. In the spiritual sense, the recognition of a spiritual authority that is superior to all mortal men brings the powerful man and the poor man within a kind of arm’s reach of one another. To wit: the powerful man cannot simply pummel the poor man into submission because the ultimate authority in the universe has a final, unavoidable say in this.

The authority the present era is forgetting

We could go on about every aspect of society degrading—and future installments of this project may do just that—but the one most prominent as I write this is the destruction of the concept of man and woman. I trust anybody reading this is aware of exactly what I mean.

There are certain hard limits on meaning that the universe imposes on us. Our words are unlimited, which just reflects that our words are symbolic sounds and there is no physical limit to the kinds of sounds and the combinations of those sounds we can make. Many people in the present age seem to revel in this “freedom” as they can be found making such nonsense combinations of sound such as, “I was born a woman and now I am a man,” or “she has a female penis,” or “some people’s gender changes every day.” Although these combinations of sound are incomprehensible and meaningless, anyone can make them with little effort at all.

But we cannot simply say in words things that are nonsense and expect they mean anything of substance. The final authority of reality has something to say about that; in fact, it has the last word.

Yet we are well on our way as a society to attempting to do just that. Our political leaders don’t merely make these nonsensical combinations of sound, they codify them into laws, thus granting them very real effects in the world. They remain nonsense at variance with final authority, but they have been given a lower material authority here on Earth. These conflicting authorities are incompatible, placing the lower in antagonism to the higher is essentially an attempt to serve two gods.

Our forgetfulness of this truth in the present era is shockingly stark. It has been enabled by our forgetfulness of what authority is.

The authority of distinction

Western society has been eroded of all subtlety. Nuanced distinction between different concepts are written off as “arbitrary,” and only material physical distinctions are treated as real, nuanced distinctions are ignored. But these nuanced distinctions between things are real, and to ignore them is to ignore the authority of reality.

One reading this at the present time can guess that one of the distinctions I have in mind is that between male and female. It is not my aim at present to argue for the existence of this distinction, as I take it as a given that all people of good faith and wisdom recognize this distinction innately. If you are reading this, and you have gotten this far, you probably already agree with me on that. But the culture that enables this distinction to be ignored is the point of this discussion.

For a large part of a society to claim with apparent sincerity that the distinction between male and female is illusory, the faculty of wisdom must have been so downgraded in that culture that this large part of society was able to almost completely do away with it. The mindset which is able to treat minute strings of contextless logical permutations as if they were descriptors of entire branches of reality is the only one which could entirely miss the bigger picture so badly that it cannot agree that male and female are a real distinction. In this specific example, these thinkers imagine that the entire question of whether maleness and femaleness are distinct things lies in whether, in observations of samples of individuals, there is no overlap in some traits in which some members of the male variety exhibit more feminine versions of that trait than some members of the female variety. For example, if an example of some woman is found to be taller than some man, then this is said to logically prove that gender is a “spectrum” and therefore the distinction between genders is illusory. But this “logic” is only valid in the narrow and context free confines of the question posed. The question itself is nonsense, the fact that in some traits there is overlap does not disprove that there are such things as maleness and femaleness. In fact, posing the question this way implicitly admits that there are such things, as it relies on the ability to rate things in terms of their maleness and femaleness even to compare them in the first place and even to posit a “spectrum” at all. The fact that visible sunlight is a spectrum between violet and red does not prove that there are no such things as violet-ness or redness. In fact, it tends to prove there are.

Therefore, the trait that permits ignoring the authority of distinction seems to boil down to a willingness to focus on a single line of rational argumentation and ignore the broader guide of wisdom. The nature of wisdom being a general understanding of the larger workings of reality, it something of a practical sense of the obvious. This is not to say they are obvious in the sense that the conclusions of wisdom do not need to be carefully considered, but in the sense that the things that prompt us to grow in our wisdom are the pieces of information all around us. These bits of information are obvious—they are the things we deal with day in and day out—even if the conclusions of wisdom that we reach through daily grappling with them are less obvious. But, because wisdom is something that is there in the open for the taking, it speaks to a massive mental derangement in society when such obvious things are missed entirely by significant portions of their populations.

This mental derangement is becoming the distinguishing marker of the current age. Unfortunately it is a marker of a society that violates the ultimate authority of reality, and it seems that no society can exist for long while at odds with that authority.