The opposite of FaDH by Pauline Baynes. From The Narnian chronicle, The Magician's Nephew
I have been guilty of wasting a great deal of my life flogging dead horses, some of which are listed above.
The point about flogging a dead horse is that the flogging is presumably supposed to achieve something - perhaps to encourage the beast to get up and work, or simply to punish it sadistically for collapsing... but whatever the intent, it is a useless activity - a waste of time, a misdirection and dissipation of energy and resources-in-general - because that horse will never work again, and cannot suffer any more.
I became an adult during a time in which all the major social institutions (such as, but not restricted to, those listed above) were in terminal decline; becoming corrupted by generic bureaucracy, ignorant and incompetent managerialism, all pushed and enforced by secular Leftism...
And (for more than 20 years) I expended escalating resources on pointing this out - again-and-again - and making sensible suggestions of how to improve things - again-and-again; failing to notice that meanwhile the horse had died.
It took an embarrassingly long time for my penny to drop. Yet, even despite my obtuseness, most people still have not noticed.
Most people have still not noticed (and would deny) that All of mainstream politics is corrupted beyond any possibility of reform; that we already, and for many years, live in a totalitarian bureaucracy; that the mainstream Christian churches are systematically anti-Christian; that science has been killed, gutted and replaced by dishonest professional 'research' based on pure careerism... and so on.
The horses are all dead, but banging an-and-on trying to prove they are dead is sheer foolishness; a waste of life.
When people cannot notice, and fight the awareness, that the horse has rigor mortis - or is indeed putrid and fly-blown; it is pointless trying to prove-by-evidence that the last flickering spark of life has long since departed.
When they can't perceive the Obvious; they either don't want to know (in which case, they are already working on the side of evil), or are incapable of knowing (in which case, we must try to heal the causes of that incapability).
But there are far too many who will just redouble the flogging, and try to enlist more people to help with plying the whip; simply because, essentially, they have no idea what else to do.
That is why I am so very grateful to have discovered Romantic Christianity; because it tells me what can and must be done, and (broadly) how to set about doing it.
4 comments:
One of my former colleagues always used to get common idioms mixed up, and this one once came out as "kicking a dead horse in the mouth."
Collapse of stout party...
An awful lot of Leave voters are going to agree with you once they realise that their vote has been permanently betrayed. I doubt they'll turn to Christianity though. What else is available?
@d - If you want a prediction - I think you are very likely correct; in which case a dose of reality will only lead to deepening of nihilism and despair.
As I have been saying for years - massively increased suicide of the ageing native population seems a plausible scenario; some signs are that this has begun to build. At least, this desire is often being expressed; but modern people are so lacking in courage that they are mostly unprepared to suffer for even a few minutes in order to die - and so they keep demanding somebody else be 'allowed' to kill them, without suffering.
But enthusiastically continuing to slide down the EU engineered chute to totalitarianism, without any protest but instead with self-righteous celebration, is spiritually even worse.
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