This really needs to be appended to my post two down. Cultural Supply Lines, I think I called it.
It is a truism that not all people live out their allotted lives. Many quit trying, quit caring, quit risking, quit learning, and just trudge through their days. Leftism is a sparkling facade, covered in bright shiny colors, and rubies and diamonds and emeralds, that promises to solve that problem. Leftists flip–the flip happens when you stop caring about the results of your actions–then they flip others.
But engaging with an idea is not really the same as engaging with life, is it? You have created something fixed, stable, and unreactive. No real physical structure is like that in the universe; nor is any living mental structure. In the sense in which I believe Maimonides used it, it is an idol. It is meant to stand in for something real, but instead comes to worshipped in its own right.
The term moral suicide refers simply to a disengagement with life: with chance, with circumstance, with reason, with love, with pain. Where are the zombie parades the most popular? As far as I can tell, the places where the Left lives. It is a species of quantitatively diversity in a monocultural zone.
The obvious point I am trying to make is that yes, you can kill yourself physically. But you can also stop trying, and die inside, as measured by the reactive impulses generating from within you relative to actual stimuli outside yourself. If the only thing you react to originates within you, then you are dead; and if you choose to remain that way, you have killed yourself.
This is perhaps a subtle point. I don’t know. It seems obvious to me.
I will add that I myself am often lost and confused. The line I follow moves in the wind, and could never be drawn with ink. When that happens, though, I find myself again, in a new place.
And I never doubt that my task is to improve the world in whatever ways God has seen fit to enable me to, large or small.