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Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
William Blake was wrong to say that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” In Paradise Lost, John Milton demonstrated a breathtaking vision which is the last thing that a poet of the ‘devil’s party’ is capable of doing. If you want to see a work of the ‘devil’s party’, Netflix has a cartoon ‘reimagining’ Cinderella’s stepsisters as the misunderstood heroines. This devilishly unoriginal work follows half a dozen similar revisionist reworkings of classic children’s stories so that the villains are the heroes, e.g. Maleficent, Wicked, Cruella, for the same reason.
Members of the ‘devil’s party’ don’t create: they take what someone else made, and invert it.
Understand that simple reality and you will understand the macro and the micro struggles all around us. When Muslim terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into buildings, they weren’t creating anything, but they also weren’t just destroying things, they were inverting them.
What evil does isn’t mindless destruction, that’s savagery, instead evil takes the building blocks of civilization, physical, spiritual, intellectual or moral, and turns them inside out whether these building blocks are governments, universities or ideas so that they become tools of destruction.
Representative governments become unrepresentative. Educational systems inculcate ignorance. The infrastructure of civilian life, buses, planes, trucks, become weapons. And the infrastructure of ideas and morality are inverted the same way to become their opposites.
Ideological inversion is everywhere and it’s the dominant form of political discourse.
Objecting to critical race theory and other racist beliefs, we are told, is racist. If you don’t believe that some races are more important than others, you’re a racist. If you object to futilely mutilating kids to make them members of another ‘sex’, you hate kids and want them to die.
Real patriots, we’re told, hate America, while fake patriots love her. If you really love America, you’ll spend all your time attacking her. And then support turning over governing authority to global institutions. Those who really care about educating kids support eliminating all educational standards. The best way to lift people out of poverty is to destroy capitalism.
And those who really care about Charlie Kirk are the ones trying to destroy his organization.
Those who claim to be ‘anti-war’ while supporting every invader, from the Nazis (Communists also protested any defense against Nazi Germany during the Hitler-Stalin Pact until the Nazis invaded the USSR), to the Soviet Union to Marxist and then Islamist regimes, that’s not a principled moral position: it’s inversion. Moral inversion appropriates the actual anti-war position an opposition to being invaded, and accuses those resisting the invasion of being the invaders.
We’ve seen this play out more recently when Muslim terrorists invaded Israel on a mission to kill, rape and kidnap non-Muslims, only to have the pro-terrorist movement invert the genocide, the perpetrators and the victims, and turn Gaza’s Muslim invaders into victims of a genocide.
None of this is actually creative. It’s corrupt. Actual creativity brings new things into being. The easiest way to spot members of the ‘devil’s party’ is all they do is corrupt everything they touch.
Beyond the undeniably tactical effectiveness of inversion, the larger agenda of inversion is to convince people that the things that they believe in and count on are all lies, that nothing is stable, nothing should be trusted and that anything that seems strong is weak. And vice versa.
Evil tries to convince us that the world we live in is evil. And that destroying it is good.
The most fundamental lesson that evil teaches is mistrust. Everything is a narrative and lurking behind it are secret gnostic truths being deliberately hidden by an evil conspiracy. Children in today’s America are indoctrinated with this impulse from the youngest of ages which primes them to be lectured about ‘systemic racism’, the ‘military-industrial complex’ and ‘capitalism’.
The revolution begins with inversion because its purpose is not to liberate, but to enslave. The only way to justify the revolution is, as Orwell warned, by making freedom look like slavery and slavery like freedom. Everything good about our lives, children are told, is really the proceeds of the crime of privilege and the only way to make the world better is to make it that much worse.
A good life, talents, skills and success are forms of privilege. The alternative is misery.
If the world is really built on lies, then the truth is a lie and lies must be the truth. Conspiracies become true through the sole justification that they ‘challenge the official explanation’. And anything that does that is innately good because all truths are just an “official explanation.”
And lies become truth and truth becomes a lie, also as Orwell warned.
Inversion teaches people to distrust and reject truth, no matter how obvious, and to embrace lies even if they are obviously not true because they come to believe that hidden truths lurk within lies and that a long gnostic journey is the only way to get closer to them.
None of this is creative either. All it does is invert truth, reality and morality.
The ultimate goal of inversion is to convince us to destroy everything that we have and everything that we have built by becoming evil under the guise of becoming good.
In real life, people don’t become villains by putting on black and cackling madly. They become evil by inverting good and evil. As the Prophet Isaiah warned us, “\Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that change darkness into light, and light into darkness; that change bitter into sweet, and sweet into bitter.” Inversion makes those who become inverted into the enemies of everything that they once loved. Including G-d. Once inverted, they destroy everything around them while telling themselves that the villains are the real and misunderstood heroes.
The triumph of inversion can be achieved by all those allied in that method. Such allies can destroy together. Their triumph can only then result in the process of their revolution continuing the same method. As long stated the revolution eats its own. That was true of Robespierre, fortunately, but not Stalin. Today’s destructive allies are the Islamists and Communists.
Daniel, you did it again sharp and clarifying.
This is one of those rare arguments that becomes a lens — not just a reaction. The idea that evil inverts rather than creates is one of those insights that reorganizes everything around it.
I’ll be thinking with this for a long time.
that’s exactly the function it’s meant to serve, a lens
karl marx was the very adept master of inverse reason , the democrats have done the same along with their rino colleagues . GOD will not be mocked .
Karl Marx in league with the Devil.
You Won’t Believe What Karl Marx Wrote About the Devil
What I hate about Greenfield is that he writes in the era of YouTube, Substack and the AI Library of Congress.
There’s just not enough time in the day to keep up with such brilliant writers while also trying to monitor the global Niagara of content.
And I hate that.
Good comment. For me I have to constantly reduce my flow of “the global Niagara of content” or I’ll drown in it. Insight comes from the real writers of actual prose not sound bytes — as it always has no matter what format — the key is to search the Niagara not for information but for insight. An insight filter is a life preserver amidst the deluge. I find as much if not more insight in comments (FPM consistently provides good writers with real insights along with quality comments). You have to constantly rebalance your ratio of insight over information or it all becomes noise. But insight reveals human nature and that beast is too scary for many people to look at up close — much easier to body surf the podcasts and “feeds” for outrage or reassurance.
Thank you to Daniel Greenfield for his astute observation abut Milton. I read Paradise Lost about five years ago in my 60s because I knew I wasn’t ready for him when younger. While reading it, I scarcely noticed the content — though I found the story fascinating as mythology similar to Norse sagas, Greek gods or Hindu Mahabharata tales — because I was so overwhelmed with the genius and beauty of the language. Truly one of the most astonishing triumphs of sustained English language writing ever. Breathtaking and mind-nourishing. Humbling and inspiring. Reading the level of language in Paradise Lost makes you proud to be human and glad to be alive — a refuge from the madness all around that never ends.
I find it so sad to think younger generations are being so dumbed down by cyber, chemical and ideological brain damage, that they’ll never be capable of reading and being uplifted by such writing as Paradise Lost. Among all the tragedies of youth today, this is to me the most tragic.
Thank you. We are being deluged with weapons of mass distraction that are meant to keep us from thinking about truth and beauty, about the civilizational stakes, while constantly ‘reacting’ to things.
This is why I spend very little time on YouTube
Inversion creates the monster of all lies, which is abandon the truth and replace it. A friend is a flat earther who used what seems to be a common phrase recently, “Everything you thought you knew is a lie”.. This statement from a non-scientist is intended to promote a conspiracy that there is special knowledge that has been hidden from us. This means all the scientific discoveries by legitimate scientists is all wrong. They have inverted established scientific truths and tried to negate them by identifying them as conspiracies. The conspirators are not scientists and are not authorities on any subject, but they try to invert the established principles based o thousands of years of observations of the planet.
The end result of this inversion is to cast doubt on the truth. Critical thinkers usually can identify and discard the murmuring of the sheep. Perhaps the bigger problem in America today is the lack of critical thinking. Critical thinkers eliminate doubt by replacing it with knowledge. The crowd usually finds ways to discard critical thinkers.
Great article from a new perspective.
Critical Theory has replaced Critical Thinking. I doubt it is accidental that they both sound the same.
Sadly this stuff is everywhere. It’s the debris from the dismantling of truth, reason and faith that undergird Western civilization. What’s left are a million gnostic YouTube videos promising to expose the great conspiracy that X is really Y.
Very interesting and powerful insight. Including ideological inversion.
People have often pointed out that reverse bigotry is as bad as bigotry. But that is not quite right. In fact, all true bigotry is reverse bigotry. All true racism e.g. is reverse racism. Even the worst of the slave-owners seem to have regarded themselves as being burdened and their slaves as being privileged. The Democrats have continued in this mindset. There is always a reversal in the ideology of true bigotry. The so-called regular straight bigotry is just a fake cartoon made up by the actual bigots, much as described in this article.
This makes a point I’ve been making online for many years, that the Left has always relied quite heavily on the inversion of reality. Thank you for this!
Operative word is ‘inversion’ — Orwell was prescient!
Thank you for this Dr.Greenfield: “William Blake was wrong to say that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” In Paradise Lost, John Milton demonstrated a breathtaking vision which is the last thing that a poet of the ‘devil’s party’ is capable of doing… Members of the ‘devil’s party’ don’t create: they take what someone else made, and invert it.”
Yes. They can only try to wreck the creation, and take as many of us – the damaged children of Adam – down into destruction with them as they can. And it is always good to know that other people see the way the world is putting good for bad, and bad for good.
And surely John Milton not only knew what the Inspired Scriptures actually say, but also believed that what they say is true. I wrote – briefly – about that in this blogpost. It is here IF anyone wants to read it: https://sueknight2000.blogspot.com/2014/02/john-milton-and-world-war-1.html
Mao was responsible for far more deaths then Hitler ever was until Satan took his wicked soul to be with Hitler, Stalin and later Castro would join them in the Lake of Fire
I look forward to seeing that day..
Mao was perhaps the Greatest Pedophile of All Time based on his nightly dalliances with hordes of young Chinese girls. How come we never hear about that?
Those who call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20) subvert the truth and make a covenant with death, Isaiah 28:
“14 Therefore, hear the word of Yahweh, O scoffers,
Who rule this people who are in Jerusalem,
15 Because you have said, ‘We have cut a covenant with death,
And with Sheol we have made a pact.
The overflowing scourge will not reach us when it passes by,
For we have made falsehood our refuge and we have hidden ourselves with lying.’
16 Therefore thus says Lord Yahweh,
‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a tested stone,
A costly cornerstone for the foundation, firmly placed.
He who believes in it will not be disturbed.
17 I will make justice the measuring line
And righteousness the level;
Then hail will sweep away the refuge of falsehood,
And the waters will overflow the secret place.
18 Your covenant with death will be canceled,
And your pact with Sheol will not stand….'”
The “cornerstone” is further spoken of in Psalm 118: 22: “The stone which the builders rejected Has become the chief cornerstone.”
Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. –Ayn Rand
That philosophical observation is called the privation theory of evil or the “absence of good.” There is a good wikipedia article outlining its development here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absence_of_good
It is sometimes used to explain how the LORD can be good when evil so powerfully exists with us (moral evil) and in the world (natural evil).
Jesus described this inversion as “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” in Matthew 12:22-32, and said that it was unforgivable. As it is, because it cuts off its perpetrators from the truths that they would need to assimilate in order to seek forgiveness, and is the exact opposite of that faith without which we cannot please God (Hebrews 11:6)
As far as islam is concerned, I have long considered it to be Satan’s response to Christianity.
To use an analogy : Bees are the insect version of Christians; busy, faithful, caring and productive. Wasps are the muslims; trouble-makers, destructive, violent, indolent.
islam is the antithesis of Christianity.