Humpty Dumpty, the Corruption of Language, and the Destruction of Society – Catholic World Report

Almost everyone is familiar with Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. In one of its most famous passages, Carroll neatly encapsulates the central issue in the use and abuse of language:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” ‘The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Alice knows words are sentinels for actual things. Humpty Dumpty wants words to mean whatever he says they mean. It is truth versus will. We will take a look at some modern Humpty Dumptys. However, this will not be a comedy. We will how see unfunny the corruption of language is in the form of two destructive 20th-century ideologies that shed light on one in our own time.

Self-identification and the meaning of language

I begin with a few anecdotes that illustrate the problem. Last year, I returned to school for a semester to audit a course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics at Catholic University under the great philosopher Msgr. Robert Sokolowski. Aristotle taught that the essence, or nature, of a thing is what makes it what it is, and why it is not, and cannot be, something else. Man can apprehend a thing’s essence or nature by naming it – by defining it with words. As an aside, in one class, he related the following incident. At a multidisciplinary conference some years earlier, Msgr. Sokolowski had spoken of a tree as being real. A lady scientist in the audience became upset by this and scolded him, saying that “a ‘tree’ is a signification we project on the other.” The name “tree” only indicated the signification he had given the object. In other words, the origin of the thing, the idea that the tree is “real,” only existed in Msgr. Sokolowski’s mind and not in the object that he had called “tree.”

I wish the scientist had been asked if she was real or simply a signification in the minds of others – or perhaps a signification in her own mind. Appositely, an Iranian writer in exile in the United States, Shahriar Mandanipour, recently wrote: “When defenseless language is being abused to fabricate lies, one must write to prove that the word ‘tree’ means ‘tree”’. The Iranian understands that a thing, such as a tree, discloses what it is, in its essence, to the person encountering it. Msgr. Sokolowski’s scientist apparently believes it is the person who discloses to the thing what it is through the signification he or she places upon it. Speech, then, is not a reflection of a disclosure but a means of control. It is not an exercise of apprehension, but of will.

A year ago December, I took a kamikaze run at the federal government by returning to it as the head of an agency that I had led 20 years earlier. It is an organization of some 1300 employees. When I entered the handsome building on Independence Avenue, there was nobody there. It reminded me of the Vincent Price movie The Last Man on Earth. He wakes up in his house one morning and goes out into the city. It is empty. Everybody is gone. That was my experience returning to federal government. I did finally find an office manager and one other woman and queried them as to where people might be. She answered, “Well, they have self-identified as vulnerable to COVID and are at home.”

The other woman nodded. “Yep, that’s it, they have self-identified as vulnerable.” I thought it was a laugh line, so I took a long pause. No one laughed. I said, “Aren’t there objective criteria by which to judge whether or not someone is vulnerable, such as a pre-existing medical condition?” No, I was told, it is self-identified as vulnerable. I then asked, “Do I have a secretary?” Yes. “Where is she?” “She self-identified as vulnerable.” “Well, what is she doing?” I queried. “She is working from home,” I was told. “Working from home?” I exclaimed. “I have not given her any work to do, so what work might she be doing?” No doubt, she self-identified as working from home. But who’s to say my secretary was even real, and not just a signification that had been projected on her, just as had happened to the “tree”.

This is a minor example of the self-identification syndrome, part of the endeavor to create ourselves in our own image through the concomitant corruption of language. More serious examples will be given later. First, we need to address further the meaning of language and what words do and why they are not simply projected significations.

In Genesis, it is man who names the animals. The power to name is the power to know. Reality becomes intelligible through words. Aquinas wrote, “Man named the animals. But names should be adapted to the nature of things. Therefore, Adam knew the animals’ natures.” The connection between words and things is real, metaphysical. Joseph Pieper put it this way: “Man speaks so that through naming things what is real may become intelligible.” In his use of words, man grasps things in their essences.

No one spoke more eloquently on the profound significance of words than Étienne Gilson and Max Picard. Gilson wrote:

Man alone has been created with a knowing mind and a loving heart, in order that, by knowing and loving all things in God, he might refer them to their origin, which is at the same time their end… His essential function is to lend his voice to an otherwise speechless creation, to help each thing in publicly confessing its deepest and most secret meaning, or rather its essence, for each of them is a word, while man alone can say it.

This beautiful reflection means that each existing thing is the result of Logos, the word of God. But man is the only creature in the universe that can speak the word that each thing is. Man is meant to lead the chorus of praise. That’s what words are for. It is a purpose that imparts a sacred character to them.

The 20th-century Swiss mystic Max Picard also spoke of the hieratic character of language:

The eternal and objective quality in language is the reflection of the divine Word by which the world was created and which is still actively at work in language. ‘The living Word which created and sustains the world,’ writes Potter, ‘still hovers in our hearts and on our lips.’ The original and eternal being of language seeks to be realized by men;… the goodness that strives to enter into human language and to expand within it.

Furthermore, Saint John’s Gospel states: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Through the Incarnation of the Word, creation becomes all the more sacred. Now the integrity of language has a supernatural sanction.

Since it is in the Word that words have their origin, the effort to depreciate words by severing their connection to reality ultimately depreciates the Word itself. The purpose of semantic suppression and linguistic jujitsu is to transform reality, or rather to create an ersatz reality, in order to accommodate certain preferred disorders. We don’t want what we do wrong to be wrong in reality. In fact, it’s what we convince ourselves of when we freely do it. Then we must convince others that our wrong is right – in fact, make them accede to this inversion of reality. This assault on the integrity of words is driven by what Eric Voegelin, a philosopher of the 20th century, called Gnosticism. He spoke of it as a spiritually pathological, magical reconstruction of reality, or of a “second reality”.

Here is how it works. Voegelin wrote that,

In the Gnostic dream world . . . non-recognition of reality is the first principle. As a consequence, types of action which in the real world would be considered as morally insane because of the real effects which they have will be considered moral in the dream world because they intended an entirely different effect. The gap between intended and real effect will be imputed not to the Gnostic immorality of ignoring the structure of reality but to the immorality of some other person or society that does not behave as it should behave according to the dream conception of cause and effect. The interpretation of moral insanity as morality, and of the virtues of sophia and prudentia as immorality, is a confusion difficult to unravel.

Voegelin spoke of the effects this has on language: “the obsession of replacing the world of reality with the transfigured dream world has become the obsession of the one world in which the dreamers adopt the vocabulary of reality, while changing its meaning, as if the dream were reality.”

Niccolò Machiavelli had this operational insight into the weaponization of words: “When it happens that the founders of the new religion speak a different language, the destruction of the old religion is easily effected.” The Machiavellian revolutionary, then, must inculcate new ways of thinking and speaking that amount to a new language. In the Discourse or Dialogue Concerning Our Language, Machiavelli compared using one’s own language to infiltrate the enemy’s thoughts with Rome’s use of its own troops to control allied armies. This helps us see how the current infiltration is operating and how far it has progressed.

Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, and the manipulation of language

In order to understand our own time better, let us briefly examine two 20th-century examples of the manipulation of language to create second realities. This, after all, is not the first time the world has dealt with a Gnostic imposition of a dream world. From Marxism-Leninism and Nazism, we shall also see that one cannot deny one part of reality without it affecting the rest of reality.

If you have ever had to read a Marxist-Leninist text, you will be familiar with the doublespeak of the dream language that the ideology used. According to the class theory of history, Marxism-Leninism would rescue the worker through the dictatorship of the proletariat and the liquidation of the bourgeoisie and the upper classes. Vladimir Lenin called for purging the Russian land of all kinds of “harmful insects,” of which it turns out there were many millions.

How would this be achieved? In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx said Communists, “Openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing institutions.” To attain this end, Lenin declared, “Everything is moral which is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting order.” He made explicit that, “The scientific concept of dictatorship means neither more or less than unlimited power resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restrained by any laws or any absolute rules, nothing else but that.”

During the last days of the Soviet Union, I had the privilege of meeting Alexander Yakovlev. As a member of the Politburo, he was second to Gorbachev. After the Soviet Union fell, Yakovlev had a turning of the soul. He led the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression in Russia, concentrating especially on what had been done to religious communities. Because of the Marxist-Leninist misuse of language, religion became the enemy. Yakovlev said that approximately 200,000 clergy were killed during some 60 years of Communist rule. Another 500,000 religious figures were persecuted and 40,000 churches destroyed. Half the country’s mosques and more than half the synagogues were also destroyed.

Yakovlev recounted that, “Clergymen were crucified on church’s holy gates, shot, scalped, and strangled. I was especially shocked by accounts of priests turned into columns of ice in winter. Building on the maxim that religion is the opium of the people, Lenin gave the order to carry out a campaign of merciless terror against priests, etc.” This gives us some insight into the real world consequences of the abuse of language and its use to create the illusion of a second reality, which is then forcibly imposed with terrible consequences.

I have been reading the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Dresden Jew who miraculously survived his entire time in Nazi Germany. Klemperer’s earlier conversion to Christianity and his service as a decorated soldier in World War I didn’t affect the Nazi definition of him as a “Non-Aryan”. As a consequence, he was dismissed from his university. It may have helped his chances at survival that he was married to a Christian. In any case, as a professor of philology, he had studied language. His journals, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, chronicles the time from 1933 to 1945, in two large volumes. At the granular level, they show how the Nazi ideology seeped down into the interstices of society, transforming everything – the media, the arts, grocery stores, finances, department stores, medical care, how people dressed, what they were able to say, and especially how they spoke.

The Nazis’ perversion of the German language left very little untouched. Klemperer explains, “This new language adopted by everyone in a mechanical and unconscious manner, like a poison that one swallows drop by drop without even noticing it, was my only subject of study during these wretched years.” For instance, he notes that the German word for “fanatic” changed from one of opprobrium to one of approbation. Likewise, the words “brutal”, “ruthless”, and “hard” became terms of praise.

After the war, Klemperer wrote a book titled The Language of the Third Reich, analyzing the words that were used to corrupt the German mind. As a result, he said, “It is not only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground, the language of Nazism.” As early as 1923, Hitler had stated: “The Jew is certainly a race not human. He cannot be human in the sense of the image of God.” Simply change human to nonhuman and six million people disappear.

What did Hitler think he was doing? How had he thought of his race theory of history that so closely paralleled the Communist class theory of history in its dehumanizing operations? He would have told you at the time – indeed, he said so time and again, whether in Mein Kampf, in his dinner table conversations as recorded in Table Talk, or in his many speeches – that he was following the science, not his emotions. In 1938, he declared: “National Socialism is a cool, reality based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge. . .” What science was that? Darwinism, survival of the fittest, blended with modern day eugenics, some of which he got from the United States (e.g. Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard).

Hitler was well read in books justifying eugenics and eliminating the unfit. He installed a program to do precisely that well before the camps opened to eliminate the Jews and enslave the Slavs. He proclaimed, “The laws of life are eternal and we want to obey these laws and make the German people organized.” The Aryans were the ones to win the Darwinian struggle to the top as the fittest and they would prove it by eliminating the unfit and not letting anybody who was less fit than they to pollute their bloodstream. Charting the progress in this project was the largest daily newspaper in Germany, the Nazi Racial Observer.

Like the need for “absolute power” in Marxism-Leninism, Hitler declared in Mein Kampf, “Brute force can alone insure the survival of the race.” In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor. In 1935, Nazi Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of their citizenship and prohibiting the marriage of a Jew to a non-Jew. Then came Kristallnacht, the burning of synagogues and the smashing of Jewish store windows, and, then, the full horror show began. As early as 1920, Hitler had said, “you can[not] fight a disease without killing the cause, without annihilating the bacillus. . .” Just as Lenin redefined his enemies as “harmful insects,” so Hitler redefined the Jews as bacilli.

By 1935, what was one to do? There were courageous Protestants like Martin Niemöller and, of course, the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who paid for his opposition with his life, and an even larger number of equally courageous Catholics. But what about the guy in the street? What about you? What do you do when something like this happens? The attitude can easily be: “Well, we lost that one. We will just continue on as best we can. It is probably just this one thing. Too bad for the Jews.”

No, it’s too bad for you. That was just the start. The semantic infiltration goes to seize your mind and you had better conform to it, rally to it, and be changed by it. The government campaign to achieve this was called Gleichschaltung, or “Coordination.” This was handled by government institutions like the Reich Chamber of Culture to bring artists into ideological alignment, the Reich Film Chamber for movie rectification, the Reich Radio Chamber, the Reich Chamber of Literature, and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda to do the same for the press. Even in areas of life untouched by the government’s “Coordination” efforts, people voluntarily took it upon themselves to “self-coordinate” – Selbstgleichschaltung. Why not report on one’s neighbors if they fail to give the Sieg Heil salute or are insufficiently enthusiastic? The ultimate cost of all this coordination was more than 30 million people dead in World War II.

The metaphysics of unreality and the corruption of language

From these historical examples, we know that the strategy of attrition is the same: wear people down through the repetition of the big lie or lies. We are undergoing a similar corruption of language. This explains the reason for and the operation of the inversion of language. It is what we are living through now. We are accosted by a dream world, or a second reality, constructed by LGBTQ, etc. movements, and all the alphabet disorders’ allies, who insist that any discomfort they feel, any kind of alienation they experience, is a product of our having produced it in them. So, what needs to be changed is not their moral disorders, but rather it is we who need to be changed. We must be brought into conformity with the dream world which they have constructed and in which they live.

Their demand is that we accede to this dream world, comply with it, and pretend along with them that it is real, which would make us, of course, complicit in the damage that it inflicts. The comedian, Dave Chappelle, had a dustup over his Netflix special last year when he said, “I know that trans people make up words to win arguments. This is a real thing.” Indeed, it is. The whole alphabet movement is a charade of made-up words. The word “homosexual”, for instance, was invented in the late 19th century precisely to promote the acceptance of sodomy. It took a while, but it worked.

The challenge from the trans movement could come right out of a Groucho Marx movie. In Duck Soup, when Chico is caught in a bald-faced lie, he responds: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” The trans version of this would be, “Who are you going to believe, me or my lying chromosomes?” Because a boy is actually still a boy, and the girl is still a girl, though you will be suborned into admitting the opposite. Abraham Lincoln once asked: “How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Five?” No, said Lincoln “Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

What are the metaphysics of unreality underlying this corruption of language? Where did it come from? We know where Aristotle, Aquinas, Gilson, and Picard came from – the metaphysics of reality. Jean-Paul Sartre’s paramour, Simone de Beauvoir, asserted that nothing has an a priori identity: “The basis of existentialism is precisely that there is no human nature.” Voila! Modern man decided that things no longer have essences; they are without natures. What, then, are names in relation to them? There is no longer an intrinsic connection between words and the world.

As Humpty Dumpty might say, reality becomes whatever we say it is. Naming is not knowing, but determining. In other words, since reality is nothing in itself, we get to make it up according to our druthers. We even get to make up ourselves. Since there is no human nature for de Beauvoir, there is no feminine nature either. Therefore, she said so presciently, “The mammary glands that develop at puberty have no role in the woman’s individual economy. They can be removed at any moment in her life.” When reality disappears, poof, a woman’s breasts disappear like magic.

“Nature,” De Beauvoir insisted, “is not something given.” How can this be? How can anything be anything if it has no nature? If “nothing has an a priori identity” and if nothing is “given,” why would surgery be necessary to change it? The authority of nature could not be more directly or aggressively contravened than by the surgical assault upon it. Suffering from what one is by nature is what these unfortunate trans people experience. The transgender person strikes back like a slasher against an attacker. Only when the attack is over can it be seen to have been against oneself — which is why, according to Walt Heyer, who underwent such a surgery, “41 percent attempt suicide.” There is an inherent logic to this. What is transgender surgery other than a partial suicide? A woman suicides her femininity, a man commits suicide of his masculinity. What is left is still a woman or a man, but now horribly mutilated. Many of them are then disposed to finish the job. In addition, according to Heyer, “90 percent have significant forms of psychopathology, 61 percent also have other psychiatric disorders and illnesses, 50 percent have depressive symptoms, 40 percent showed symptoms of anxiety.” No wonder. Metaphysical contradiction leads to self-contradiction, even to self-annihilation. It is in the gender abattoir that we can see what this truly is: a revolt against being.

In Virginia, teaching the trans ideology has been mandated in the schools. You must call a boy a girl and a girl a boy, if that is the identity the parents choose for their child or if the child chose it for itself. According to Policy 8040 of the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS):

LCPS staff shall allow gender-expansive or transgender students to use their chosen name and gender pronouns that reflect their gender identity without any substantiating evidence, regardless of the name and gender recorded in the student’s permanent educational record. School staff shall, at the request of a student or parent/legal guardian, when using a name or pronoun to address the student, use the name and pronoun that correspond to their gender identity.

The children are encouraged to make these choices even in early grade school.

A young teacher in Loudoun County, Tanner Cross, refused to comply. He was told that a girl in his class had “transitioned” and was now a boy. He was to change pronouns accordingly and fall into line. He refused to do so. This is the reason he gave:

It is not my intention to hurt anyone, but there are certain truths that we must face. We condemn school policies that would damage children, defile the holy image of God. I love all of my students, but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences. I am a teacher, but I serve God first, and I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it is against my religion. It is lying to a child. It is abuse to a child. It is sinning against God.

Tanner Cross had his Thomas More moment and he passed it. What he did created a stir in Virginia. As a partial consequence, there is a new governor and a new House of Delegates, and the trans policies are being walked back. Tanner Cross has returned to his work. So, it is not quite 1935 in America yet. We can still fight back, and the brave people who refuse to lie are the ones who lead. However, anyone who thinks that the denial of reality today is any less profound than it was in 1935 Germany is kidding themselves. Does this statement sound too extreme? Then try this: publicly state that surgically disfiguring yourself so that you can pretend you are a person of the opposite sex is both futile and wrong; or proclaim that giving an underage child hormone blockers to skew their sexual orientation is child abuse and immoral – and see how long it takes for you to be canceled.

In 2018, Benedict XVI warned about the power of “the global dictatorship of ostensibly humanist ideologies.” He said:

Contradicting them means being excluded from the basic social consensus. One hundred years ago anyone would have found it absurd to speak of homosexual marriage. Today anyone opposing it is socially excommunicated. The same goes for abortion and creating human beings in a laboratory. Modern society is formulating an anti-Christian creed and opposing it is punished with social excommunication. It is only natural to fear this spiritual power of Antichrist and it really needs help from the prayers of a whole diocese and the world church to resist it.

In a high act of Gleichschaltung, the Coordinator-in-Chief, President Biden signed an executive order upon entering office that required Section 1557 and Title IX be interpreted to include gender identity as a protected trait. According to Newsweek: “The reinterpretation meant that gender transition interventions, services, surgeries, and drugs on demand—even for children—were required regardless of a doctor’s medical judgment, religious beliefs or conscientious objections.” A U.S. District Court judge’s ruling blocked the Biden administration’s mandate. Affronted by this judicial assault on Coordination, the Biden administration is, of course, appealing.

This is how far it has gone. Consider the chemical castration of a child. Think of a parent who would do that to their child. Think of the school that would approve and encourage that it be done and insist on conformity from the other children to go along with the program. Think of a doctor who would perform this, and you see that all those sectors of society have already been infiltrated by the second reality. This is how deep the rot is. The media is on board; the corporate gurus are on board; the educational system is on board; even the military is on board.

Concerning the latter, I had a private conversation with a military officer. I asked him how the alphabet disorders go over with the troops. Apparently, the U.S. military never left Obama land during the Trump administration because the female adjutant in his unit, following the guidance of Simone de Beauvoir, had her breasts removed and whatever other horrible surgical deformations were required for her to return, supposedly, as a man – all expenses paid by the Defense Department (courtesy of the American taxpayer). When she returned in her new guise, the others in the unit were instructed by the commanding officer to refer to her as “he” – a clear example of “Coordination” or Gleichschaltung, as the Germans called it.

I also asked the officer, “How does it break down within your unit as to who accepts the trans dream world and who knows there is something wrong with it?” He answered: “It is not so much a matter of officers versus enlisted men. The demarcation line is between who has had a college education and who has not. The people with college educations are with the program. They do not see a problem. The people who have not gone to college respond, ‘You have got to be kidding; this is crazy.’” They have kept their common sense. Of course, they can only say this privately or they will be penalized. In an Orwellian touch, the Biden administration has established a Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Homeland Security. This is from the same administration that has a Gender Policy Council. Big Brother is watching.

Here are examples of how self-coordination, Selbstgleichschaltung, is working today. Walt Disney Co. energetically self-coordinates. Disney executive producer, Latoya Raveneau, says that she advances a “not-at-all secret gay agenda” for children’s animation. “I was just, wherever I could, adding queerness. No one stopped me, and no one was trying to stop me.” Indeed, they were “super welcoming.” A senior Disney executive, Karey Burke, claims to have a child who self-identifies as transgender and another one who is “pansexual.” In a statement that epitomizes “self-coordination,” she said: “I hope this is a moment where…we just don’t allow each other to go backward.” When it comes to China, Disney self-coordinates in a different direction. For the Chinese market, it edits out all the LGBTQ-related content.

At a more local level, one of my wife’s friends was accosted by a neighbor, who came over and angrily demanded that she and her children apologize to her daughter because her daughter now thought she was a boy. This woman insisted that my wife’s friend’s children use the new pronoun, and now call Jill Jack. So, it is not necessarily the state police or the school board who move in and enforce “Coordination.” It is one’s neighbors whose minds have been conformed to the construction of the dream reality. In acts of self-coordination, they then attempt to impose it on those around them. School districts are also active. In Wisconsin’s Kiel Area School District, three eighth-grade boys are being investigated under Title IX for “mispronouning.” Apparently, this is now a form of sexual harassment. According to The Wall Street Journal, “these children used ‘her’ to refer to a classmate who wants to be called ‘them.’” They must be made to do this because the only way the dream reality can survive is by expanding.

Conquering to survive by appealing to the “purposelessness of things”

Napoleon made the famous remark, “I must conquer to survive.” Why? Because he was an illegitimate ruler. He came to power through a coup d’état. He knew that what legitimacy he could give himself would come only through successful conquest. So, he could never stop. The inversion of language also must conquer to survive. Its proponents have to keep pushing. They insist that you participate. You must join the lie or be ostracized. Otherwise, some kid like Tanner Cross is going to stand up and blow them away by speaking the truth.

Here are a few examples from other spheres of life that are under daily assault from the dream world. Some of them are amusing in a Humpty Dumpty sort of way, but unfortunately they are not fiction. For instance, the New York City Health Department form for new parents requesting birth certificates asks whether the person giving birth is male or female. Humpty Dumpty gets to decide. After all, explains Andrea O’Reilly, professor at the School of Women’s Studies, York University, Toronto: “Motherhood is… primarily not a natural or biological function.”

Several Christmases ago, an advertisement on the Hallmark Network showed lesbians kissing under the mistletoe. When the network pulled the ad, there was a concerted backlash, including from GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). The Hallmark Network caved under pressure. The president of GLAAD, Sarah Kate Ellis, said she was thrilled by the reversal because otherwise, as she explained to CNN, “for my wife and I to try to explain this to our ten-year-old twins is mortifying.” The mortifying thing in this sentence is not only its grammar but the fact that Sarah could not possibly have a “wife” because she is a woman, and the children could not possibly be “our” ten-year-old twins because only one of them could possibly be the mother, and the other one could not possibly be the father. Where, in fact, is dad?

In a more recent example, the Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg took paid paternity leave after announcing that he and his “husband,” James Glezman, “are delighted to welcome Penelope Rose and Joseph Augustus Buttigieg to our family.” The first thing to notice is that the family is a matriarchy because Buttigieg considers himself the “wife” in relationship to Glezman. But if Glezman is the “husband,” why isn’t Buttigieg named Glezman? Rather, Glezman took Buttigieg’s name, and the children have his name as well. So, it is a matriarchy. The next question is how could Buttigieg be on paternity leave when he is not the father, but is pretending to be the mother? The mother would be on maternity leave. The photo used to introduce the two men with their adopted twins is of them in hospital smocks lying in a hospital bed, holding the swaddled babies. Who stage-managed that shot? Had one of them just given birth? The optics of being photographed in that way were perfect for encouraging the delusion of the dream reality.

This raises the issue: where is mom? In all the media and political celebrations of how wonderful this was, no one asked the question as to where the real mother is and under what pretext the children were taken from her. Was she just used as a breeder? Or what, exactly? Nobody mentions her, as if her existence is an indiscretion. Mom has been canceled, just like the father of the GLAAD president’s twins.

Because this has been going on for so long now, it is not unusual for grown children from such arrangements to gain access to the files and track down who their real mother or real father is. When that happens, the first thing the grown child is likely to ask the missing parent is: where were you? Why didn’t you want me? The open wound is there. They are the casualties of the dream reality that has been created only by excluding at least one of the parents. However, these victims exist only in reality, and not in the dream world. So, they are generally ignored.

Sometimes, Gleichschaltung and Selbstgleichschaltung have synchronized movements. For instance, President Joe Biden was particularly proud of his inclusivity in the nomination of Rachel Levine to be U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health because Rachel is really Richard, before surgical intervention. (In the real world, Richard had a wife and children; in the dream world, he doesn’t.) Joining the official celebration of Richard’s transmogrification, USA Today, without even a touch of irony, self-coordinated by declaring Rachel “Woman of the Year.” Even though it got it wrong, at least USA Today made a stab at what a woman is. Otherwise, there could hardly be a “Woman of the Year.” During her Senate confirmation hearings to be a Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson did not do as well. When asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” Judge Jackson lamely replied, “I’m not a biologist.” Since Jackson’s husband was in the audience, perhaps Sen. Blackburn could have asked him if he knew.

I have encountered similar absurdities in online debates with homosexuals regarding their self-coordination. The dialogues are hilarious in a way, almost as if written by a satirist, but nonetheless serve as perfect illustrations of how complete the inversion of language is in the dream reality and how it ultimately affects everything else. At Mercatornet.com, I had an online exchange with a homosexual about the purpose of sex and procreation and, in this particular instance, the requirement of consummation for the validity of marriage. In civil law, it is or was nearly always the case. I said:

Homosexuals cannot physically consummate a marriage – which means and has always meant coital sex. Isn’t that obvious? How could you possibly deny it? (His responses are italicized.)

You ask how anyone could possibly deny that homosexuals are unable to consummate a marriage. It’s easy. The word “consummate” flexes a little just as the word “marriage” has done. Consummation means something slightly different for a gay couple than for a straight one. Does it matter? Do we even need the word “consummation” in a gay marriage?

Simply call a giraffe a donkey and, voila, it becomes one! Magic! Just like homosexual marriage.

Yep. That’s more or less the way it works, except that there has to be widespread acceptance of the word’s new or expanded meaning.

Do you really think your redefinition of reality actually changes reality? If so, you are living in a magical world—and I don’t mean Disneyland. Welcome to the world of Gnosticism and all its attendant spiritual pathologies.

According to my interlocutor, nothing has a purpose. The eye is not for seeing, he says. It simply sees accidentally. He has to say this because he needs to establish that our sexual organs have no purpose, either. They are not unitive or procreative. Of course, if were this true, my interlocutor would not have been present. Neither would any of us. He claimed:

Homosexual acts serve the same primary function for homosexuals as heterosexual acts do for heterosexuals. Arousal and release guarantee the smooth functioning of the nervous system… It is obviously not essential that semen end up fertilizing an egg.

But you obviously cannot deny that the purpose of the semen is to fertilize the egg.

Yes, I can deny that. I just did. Maybe it’s hard to grasp, or maybe you’re clinging to a popular, not a biological, understanding of the word “purpose.”

Here is another example – this one from Amazon comments in a negative reaction to my book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything:

Where I disagree is with the traditional assumption that natural entities have ‘in-built purpose.’ This is a mere assumption, not something that has been discovered. The assumption results from projecting the way we create our own artifacts onto the creative activity of nature. Without this assumption the natural law case made against homosexuality fails. To truly support his argument, Reilly would have to PROVE that this age-old assumption is the actual truth of living things. (I would assert this to be an impossible task as living things are as ultimately purposeless as everything else in the universe.)

The purposelessness of the universe would seem a high price to pay for the rationalization of homosexual behavior, but it appears to be a necessary one. The “purposelessness of things” is the underlying metaphysics that allows for the Gnostic transformation into a dream world or a second reality – spelled out so explicitly, as we saw earlier, by Simone de Beauvoir. So why not lop off the mammaries and why not support Joseph Stalin, as she and Sartre did? So what if he had to eliminate millions of people. Those were “insects,” right?

The flight from reality will surely fail

However, using things outside of the purposes for which they are made despoils them. Everything has a purpose. A thing’s purpose lets us know what it’s for. Our corrupt culture is a denial of this reality. Thus, the misuse and abuse of things, persons, and selves. If you remove something from the natural order in which it finds fulfillment, it becomes self-destructive and self-alienating. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima, an Orthodox Christian monk, warned:

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect, he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.

This is the horror through which we are now living, but these derangements will not succeed in the long run. Dream worlds do not last. Such dreams invariably turn into nightmares from which people eventually try to wake themselves. After all, reality still exists; it cannot be banished. Logos will reassert itself one way or the other. How long it will take, how much damage the dream reality will cause, is up to us. We must confront the counter principles of existence with the real ones. Above all, don’t allow yourself to be “coordinated,” and, by all means, do not “self-coordinate.” As Alexander Solzhenitsyn counselled, “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”

Reflecting upon his experiences in Nazi Germany where he had been imprisoned, Heinrich Romnen, one of the great teachers of natural law, wrote,

When one of the relativist theories is made the basis of a totalitarian state, man is stirred to free himself from the pessimistic resignation that characterizes these relativist theories and to return to his principles.

Like him, we must stir ourselves. In respect to the issue of natural law and natural reason in our decrepit day and age, Monsignor Sokolowski counsels, “We have to restore the very concept of natural ends.” We have the means at hands to do this in our own country’s foundation. They are called “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Further encouragement comes from Eric Voegelin: “The closure of the soul in modern Gnosticism can repress the truth of the soul, but it cannot remove the soul and its transcendence from the structure of reality.”

This is why the flight from reality will surely fail. Humpty Dumpty will have a great fall. We can help make sure this happens by something as simple as telling the truth. As Robert Cardinal Sarah advises: “When barbarians doggedly persist and use the most refined methods to destroy morality, the family, and the mystery, it is necessary to speak forcefully.”

(Editor’s note: This essay is a slightly edited version of an address given by the author in Chicago on February 11, 2022, to the Catholic Citizens of Illinois.)

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