The Mother of Dissolution

“Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution” – St. Thomas Aquinas.

Words matter to the extent they accurately represent the concept for which they were originally intended. When you wish to make a piece of toast, for example, you request a “toaster” not a “philodendron.” Surely some concepts are more abstract than others. This reality, however, is no justification for obfuscation nor does it make holding the loftier terms to their original definition any less important. Indeed, quite often it is more so.

But what with ever-slackening educational standards and minds liquidated from endless hours before the tele, modern man can hardly be expected to prevail in the Herculean task of holding words to their meaning. Thus “freedom” today is synonymous with perversion, “greed” refers to any instance of any creature acting in its own self-interest, and “justice” equates to making sure everyone has the same number of points at the end of the game.

It is this last abomination of explication upon which we wish to focus.

It is our contention that the Obamanon by which America is currently disfiguring herself was made possible by this contemporary misinterpretation of justice. The laughably un-American policies and proposals, the bald-faced contempt for free-market values, the sanctimonious arrogance of apologizing to the world for American greatness, all are made acceptable to the American people to the extent they believe these atrocities to be acts of “justice.”

After all, under the modern definition of justice, the realities of poverty and suffering can only exist as a result of some injustice, and could never be the by-product of human stupidity, fecklessness, impulsiveness, or outright evil. Inequality of circumstance simply IS injustice, and Bob’s your Uncle! Ergo the gains of the rich, clearly ill-gotten, must be redistributed. The ventures of the capitalists, pure wanton profiteering, must be shackled. And American influence in the world, nothing but imperialistic bullying, must cease and desist. Only thus can justice be restored. Yes we can. And the people nod in passive agreement.

But, as has been pointed out so many times before by others nearly as brilliant as ourselves, equality of circumstances for all is not justice. In fact, the key ingredient in establishing equality of circumstances for all is injustice, usually in the form of jack-booted thugs, firing squads, tanks, and secret prisons.

Alas, modern man, in his zeal to demonstrate his compassion, his empathy, his sense of justice for those less fortunate, is in the process of securing the exact opposite of all for all. He has removed actual justice from the equation and need now only sit back and await validation of St. Thomas Aquinas’ supposition, “Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution” i.e. chaos, anarchy, tumult, pestilence, suffering, and death.

Which brings us to Sonia Sotomayor; wise Latina, President Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court justice, and the embodiment of all of the above. By her words and actions this woman has demonstrated her conviction that justice is not the preservation of equality of opportunity, but the establishment of equality of circumstances. It is attainted and maintained not by adherence to a mutually beneficial rule of law, but by quotas, affirmative action, and the intrinsic knowledge that she knows better. She will judge others not by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin. She has been called – and rightly so – a racist, a supremacist, an irresponsible even reckless jurist, and she will win confirmation as a justice on the highest court in the land on or about July13.

In the objective world, a toaster remains distinct from a philodendron, justice remains distinct from empathy and preference, and dissolution is dissolution. But in this era of the new “justice,” we must do everything in our power to pretend otherwise, lest we find ourselves held in contempt.

May God help America.

Cheers,

Charlie