Bruce Charlton contemplates the Miles Mathis Committee:
The visual art work strikes me as good quality commercial art/ illustration, and I am unsurprised that he can (apparently) make a living from doing it. But – judged as ‘art’ it is spiritually empty at best, and sometimes it is nasty and evil-tending.
The sense of queasiness and repulsion induced by some of MM’s art is mirrored in the effect of much of the writing; and in his self-satisfied (unopposed, pridefully-affirmed, multiply-defended) egotism.
He deploys the kind of ranting aggressive manner associated with the later Nietzsche in his ‘Antichrist’ phase. I mean the Nietzsche whose chapter headings in his last (pre-totally-insane from syphilis dementia) book Ecce Homo include “Why I am so clever”, “Why I am so wise”, and “Why I write such excellent books”.
This is a manner which, I believe, emanates from someone who lacks a coherent metaphysics and who knows it unconsciously, and wants to keep that knowledge unconscious. One who has excluded the necessary assumptions from-which he could (in principle) discern, critique and advocate values – yet continues to engage in making multiple (quasi-objective) value affirmations and rejections.
In other words; an aggressive assertiveness that brooks no resistance is – it seems to me – the characteristic affect and affectation of a moralist whose deepest beliefs are nihilistic. It is a proximately in-your-face confidence and fluency; overlying an implicit and unacknowledged/ denied conviction of ultimate emptiness, futility, despair.
The Miles Mathis phenomenon evaluated, Bruce Charlton
My conclusions are very similar to Charlton’s, although I don’t find Mathis to be anywhere nearly as grating as he does, mostly because well-justified arrogance doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Mathis is intelligent, interesting, and informative, but there is a ceiling on his utility and his understanding due to his essential materialism and concomitant inability to recognize the reality of spiritual evil acting in the world today.
Karl Denninger, although a Christian, is limited in much the same way, although I fully expect Denninger to adjust eventually because he, unlike Mathis, has already accepted the possibility of the necessary intellectual framework required to make coherent sense of Clown World, its history, and its future actions. I don’t see Denninger’s pride, however considerable, standing in the way of his acceptance of intelligent and purposeful evil for its own sake in the way that I anticipate it standing in the way of Mathis doing the same.
But both men are uniquely valuable in an era where very few men see anything clearly and few of those who do are willing to speak openly about what they see. Denninger, in particular, is one of the greatest heroes of the 21st century, in my opinion, for his courageous work in exposing, first the facts about Covid, then about the Covid “vaccines”. As I said on the Darkstream the other night, he has probably saved more lives than Florence Nightengale or most of the other great lifesavers of human history.
None of us are perfect, all of us see, as though through a glass, darkly. Which is why those who seek to find the truth are to be cherished and celebrated, not criticized, regardless of their lack of perfect understanding.
https://voxday.net/2023/05/10/the-limits-of-the-materialist/
