Freedom is not available to those who want their own way and only see their reality. Freedom is being open to truth and accepting that reality which is not of one's own making, but in the case of the Christian, God's making. Assent to God's Will is reality.
I had cancer, and I had to accept the consequences. This is reality. At first, one goes into a denial, a status quo, until one cannot deny the symptoms, or the diagnosis. The quicker one accepts the truth, the more easily it is to deal with the losses which inevitably come. That God allows cancer, or death, or separation, only means that we are given an opportunity to face reality and be freedom. Deceit creates chains, unhealthy heavy chains, which hold one down to a prison of lies and unreality. Truth breaks those chains, be it through an illness, or treatment for alcoholism or psychological counseling or the Sacrament of Confession. Basically, humility is just truth. I am this and not this. I can do this and not this. I can be this and not this.
The lies of our century have created tyrannies. All tyrannies rely on propaganda, the building up and maintaining of lies. Why people assent to believe in propaganda is a mystery to me.I taught college and university levels classes, including logic for years. I gave up in 2010, when I realized that the administrators on the whole were as out of touch with reality as my students. This Post-Modern phenomenon is the result of complete subjectivism. The world of POTUS is his world, and the world of my student Z was his world and the world of my administrator Y was her world. The thing which I do not understand is that there are many highly intelligent people in Congress and the Supreme Court, in America, in the Catholic Church, who "seem" grounded. Are they all in their own little worlds? Is this how most people survive? As a person raised on Aristotle and Aquinas, I was taught that truth begins with what is, what is natural in nature, for example, or what we perceive objectively. I am not sure how people lose objectivity. A good teacher has it, a good parent has it, and a good spouse had it. How can a person really love without objectivity? Real love is objective. It is God's Love.
How can we trust the nation to a group of people who are living in cloud-cuckoo-land? It is very scary, as some other nations, which are living in reality (are there any) could easily take advantage of our Disneyland outlook. The delusions are so broad and deep, is there any chance of this changing without great catastrophes waking us all up? Ah, the Greeks, who invented that word, catastrophe, knew all about the change of the wheel of fortune, the facing of truth for such as Oedipus, through tragedy. I do not wish for this, but it does seem, as in Greek drama, inevitable. In Greek drama, which I taught and in which my son did some acting, there is a movement of the poetry from strophe to antistrophe to catastrophe.
The prologue and the entrance ode occur followed by the strophe, the turning of the chorus, physically either on or off stage, at a different level. The antistrophe is another turn, matching the meaning of the text, the poetry, so that the physical movement imitates the words. The catastrophe is the sudden changing of the action, following some episode, where, at least in the great tragedies, a sudden event of horror occurs, such as Oedipus' realization that he killed his father and married his mother. This is followed by the stationary ode and the exit ode.
We are headed in the States for the catastrophe. As long as people, as even the heroes or heroines in the Greek dramas, live in deceit or darkness, there is no truth. The catastrophe brings truth, light and usually, peace.
We can only hope. Oedipus' story is told in three plays: the trilogy of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. These tragedies have three dramas to work out some type of peace and reconciliation. Do we have time?
