Below I address myself specifically to the pathologically outraged woman, whose figure is at the frontline of the Leftist attack on Western civilisation. Yet these words are a moral challenge for anyone who would defend her position or condone her hubris. I do not claim that a pathologically outraged woman (or man) does not deserve respect. It is wrong to dehumanise a person by reducing him or her to some error. It does not matter if the error is especially grievous, or if the person is deeply entangled in it. Nor do I claim that outrage as such is pathological or even irrational. Nor again do I claim that women have no cause for moral outrage—far from it.
There is a time to protest. One must speak out against all injustice, whoever the perpetrators turn out to be. One must protest in due measure against every injustice caused by men, and against every injustice caused by women. Yes, you heard me correctly. One must protest against every injustice caused by women. That is the rub—and the sore point, the blind spot of the Zeitgeist.
The pathological outrage of the radical Left represents, among other things, the diabolical desire to separate “justice for women” from “justice for men”. This is not justice, but its perversion. It is nothing more than a vengeful libido dominandi (lust for power) dressed up in the royal robe of justice for rhetorical effect. The “outraged woman” of the Left either perpetrates injustice by perverting the cause of justice, or is used (perhaps unwillingly) for such a purpose. Whenever the cause of justice is treated as if it were the exclusive “property” of one identity group and refused to the “opposing” identity group, justice is perverted. Injustice and ultimately barbarism then begin to prevail through stealth.
A fundamentally unjust way of thinking overtakes society at all levels, spreading like an undetected cancer. This is a toxic ideology which hides its true nature under the protective sign of “justice”. What we are dealing here is a sinister illusion which convinces its unthinking host that the body is cancer and that the cancer is the cure. Clarity, balance and harmony must be restored. Justice does not respect the dignity of the man alone. But neither does it respect the dignity of the woman alone. For justice does not play a zero-sum-game. Justice is in favour of man-and-woman. More precisely, it is in favour of man-and-woman-and-child. Whoever would divide the concerns of justice is an enemy of justice. Whoever would divide the concerns of justice in the name of “justice” is an enemy of justice twice over.
These revolutionaries are no friends of justice, despite their outward moralism. For they hate balance and reason, order and harmony. Justice is not on the side of the revolution. Revolutionaries take power by means of imbalance and unreason (the inversion of values, the skewing of emphases, the exaggeration of partial truths), and through conflict and disorder (identity politics, tribalism, the politics of grievance). If a man speaks out in anger against the perversion of justice, far from being a cause of division, he shows that he is in favour of true peace, which is grounded in the indivisibility of the Good, the impartial unity of Justice. For this reason, he proves himself to be on the side of every human person as such.
If a man is on the side of justice, then he will fight against every fundamental division that is caused or promoted by false ideology. He will oppose every diabolic division of the Logos. When it comes to the division that matters—namely, the division that would reduce society to a zero-sum-game between opposing identity groups—the radical Left (and its shadow-opposite) is its cause, not he. Certainly, by speaking the truth a man “brings a sword”—an ideological separation or “parting of the ways”—but this sort of division is not something to be avoided at all costs. The fundamental division—the fragmentation of the Logos and the perversion of Justice—this is the division that counts. The inevitable fruits of this division are the guillotine and the gulag. If there is a “parting of the ways” as a result of speaking out against this error, so be it.
Dear Outraged Woman, the Mascot of the Left:
Shouting “Misogyny!” does not exempt you from the human condition. At the end of the day, you are not above anyone else. You are just another human being, like the rest of us. Stop looking down on everyone who does not think like you. Stop inflating yourself. Your pride is sickening. So many of us—men and women—have had enough. Our blood is boiling in indignation. Enough of this.
Yes. Your pride. Just because you are a woman—and just because men have (perhaps) been awful to you—that does not make you a god. You too are capable of grave evil. You have shown yourself capable of the same evil that you object to and sometimes even project onto others. But you will not have any of this. You must make man the root of evil, and woman the innocent victim. You assume, in effect, that you are just like God. That your motivations could not possibly be wicked. For this reason you have become grossly corrupt. You presume that, being a woman—or a “liberated” or “educated” or “progressive” woman—you are automatically placed above those others. That you cannot possibly be tarnished by depravity or lowered to “their” level. That you are essentially innocent. That you are a divine judge who is never subject to divine judgement. Indeed, you have taken a divine throne for yourself, and you relish your divine status. You cling to your assumed power and authority. You are mighty—the Divine Woman.
Nothing—no man, no child, no law—can stand before Thee. You need only shout “Misogynist!” and all will crumble before you. Do not deceive yourself. Everything has become clear. You cannot deceive us any longer—you love this power. You lust for it. At the bottom of it all, your radical feminist “ethics” is nothing but raw lust for power. You relish the experience of being inflated. You love being elevated into a super-human whose demands cannot be questioned. You are hooked. You tasted the fruit. You wanted it, you plucked it, and you ate. You are addicted, in your intestines, to your divine status. Don’t tell me that a woman cannot become evil. That is a lie—the very lie that has led to your demise.
Don’t misunderstand me. Don’t deliberately misunderstand this criticism, as you do so often with your critics, in order to defend your position (your appropriated divine status) at all costs. Don’t misinterpret me. I’m not saying that you, as a woman, are more prone to evil than to good.
And I’m not saying that you, as a woman, are more prone to evil compared with men. I am merely denying the outrageous and impious thesis—the infectious heresy of these mad times—that men are more prone to evil than women. No, the truth is that men and women are equally capable (by grace, perhaps) of good. And equally capable of great evil. What you can’t see is that your hermeneutics of suspicion can be applied to yourself and your ideology just as much as to anyone. More than that, it applies to you and condemns you in the very act in which you wield it against others. The finger of blame turns upon itself. Stop this outrageous projection of all evil outwards, onto men. No, I am not saying that you must introject all evil into yourself instead.
There are more than two alternatives. In your mind, it seems, here are only two. Either (a) subject yourself to extreme guilt, shame, servility, and self-hatred. Or (b) elevate yourself to the status of divine glory and innocence over against ever-guilty man. But there is another option. Leave your divine throne—it was never yours to take—and put your feet on the ground. Be content just to be a human being. Alongside those other mere human beings: men. You won’t be happy up there. And while you stay up there you’re wreaking havoc on everyone down here—men, women, children.
It’s wrong. Please get down.
Yes, it hurts.
Coming down, accepting that you are just another human being. Being one of us. But what other option do you have, besides madness? Healing and sanity cannot be reached in any other way. Can’t you see that your moralistic self-elevation is the cause of your insanity? Haven’t you noticed that your high moralism—a moralism which ironically is based on the basest of motives, pure lust for power—has lost all sense of reality, and is now spiralling out of control? That “your highness” is becoming more ridiculous and grotesque and self-contradictory and laughable and horrendous every day? Am I being too “preachy” for you? That’s rich, coming from you. Are you saying that you object to “preachiness” as such—or just when it is directed at you? We can see through your objection. We can see through all of your objections. You use a high moral principle to defend yourself from anyone who might shed light on your vile falsity and corruption. You do not believe in the nobility of moral principles, and yet you appeal to them in your will-to-power. For base reasons, you instrumentalise what is noble—the true and the good.
We don’t take that seriously any more. We know your tricks.
You have shown that you don’t believe in humbling yourself before the noble and the holy—and in any case you have told us. You only worship yourself, and whatever ideas reflect well on your “divinity”. So we don’t believe you any more. We don’t take seriously your lofty objections, your appeal to moral principles. We know you don’t really believe in anything of moral substance—not while you occupy that self-appointed throne of yours. There’s no humility in you while you are up there, so there’s no sincerity in your moral outrage. It’s just an expression of your will-to-power. Nothing more. You are making a farce of morality—nay, you are doing sacrilege to morality, using it like that. We won’t dignify your false moralism by listening to you. Seriously—you are not to be taken seriously. Not until you humble yourself—no, not below everyone else, but beside everyone else.
Put your feet on the ground again. You are no queen.
Not when you behave like that. If you truly want to dignify and elevate yourself, then humble yourself. Acknowledge that are you are not the centre of everything. Acknowledge the limits of your will. Acknowledge the presence of an objective moral order. Accept Reality—and the fact that you are not the centre of it. Let go of your need to be the victimised Sun at the centre of the solar system, with everyone else revolving around you as planets paying you homage. Yes, it really is as pathetic as it sounds. You have used your victim status for the basest of motivations—lust for power. You have turned your hurt into a means of becoming “divine”. You are now the god whom none shall question. You are the Great Victim in the Sky. Victimhood is now synonymous with the Sacred. Victimhood is now the Unquestionable. The Limit of Thought. The First Principle of all Morality.
Well guess what. Even as a victim, you are only a finite person.
As bad as it was to have gone through all of that, you are not divine. You are not exempt from the demands of Truth. You must still answer to the moral law. The terrible violence that was done to you, the unspeakable pain which you endured, the singular depth of your humiliation (I am assuming this is all true)—none of this is infinite. Do not imagine that your suffering extends outwards forever, like the universe. Do not imagine that there is nothing beyond it. For there is an Unspeakable Something which is far greater than you. Compared to this Something—compared to the divine Everything—your suffering verges on being insignificant, and your importance is next to nothing. You and your suffering are limited. On the “other side”, there is an all-encompassing Everything which embraces you and contains you. It understands you perfectly, and accompanies you in love.
You were never alone. But you didn’t know this.
You didn’t want to know, or others didn’t want you to know. In any case, in your atheism you hoped to achieve unlimited significance for yourself. If there is nothing greater than yourself which might contain you and embrace you, then you can be God yourself. You preferred to be uncontained by anything greater. You normalised your lack of containment. No wonder then that you hold onto your suffering. No wonder that you resist every truth that would relativise your suffering or move it away from the centre of everyone’s attention. You need your suffering in order to think that nothing can contain you. You need it to be so great that nothing can contain it. Because if there is nothing to contain your suffering, then your suffering is the Great Unsurpassable Reality, and your divine status is guaranteed. In that state, of course, you cannot be healed. But from your point of view, that is no loss.
Better to be one who wields divine power but cannot be healed, than to be a whole person who is merely a human being. Like a child whose suffering was never contained by a loving parent, your suffering has not been contained. Your voluntary atheism (an expression of your patrophobia) perpetuates this situation. Your irrational outbursts, your moralistic outrage—these are the inarticulate protests of a child whose emotions have never been contained by love.
Objectively speaking, your suffering was always contained—by the hidden God. But you haven’t internalised that containment. You haven’t yet realised that your suffering was always contained. You haven’t known God as your Father. No, I am not doing “violence” to anyone by speaking in this way. This is not a zero-sum-game. Like all people, men are capable (if the circumstances are right) of transcending their interests in view of universal truth and the common good. With your neo-paganism, you want us all to believe that everything boils down to a competitive struggle for existence. You want to pull everyone down into a tribal war—a bunch of collective identities fighting it out in the same arena. You don’t believe that a man can speak out in the name of the truth (but contradicting this, you are outraged when he does not). You don’t believe that a man can be committed to justice (but contradicting this, you are outraged when he is not). On your view, a man can only speak on behalf of himself as a male. On your view, whenever a man speaks up, he is merely serving the interests of men, as opposed to the interests of women. On your view, it is impossible for a man to speak on behalf of “truth” and “justice”. In your view, the critical words of a man are necessarily “violent” (and not merely challenging) if they are about women.
But all of this is false.
It is not “violent” to insist that all people on this planet, including women, are merely human beings. It is not “violent” to say of women that they are unexceptional. Women, no less than men, are called to goodness. Women, no less than men, are capable of evil. Wherever the sin of pride, or the disorder of narcissism, has taken root, any critical word will certainly be experienced as a certain “violence.” But there is nothing essentially immoral about challenging the inflated ego of a proud person. Whenever the truth is spoken, it threatens to burst the bubble of illusion surrounding the narcissist. The truth is certainly a threat in relation to the inflated ego. But in relation to the person, it is an objective good. The truth builds up the person by exposing the inflated identity as false. Come down from your throne. You are equal to every man.
