Morality is a fixed given. It is inescapable in presence and in principle. In other words, you cannot imagine a world without morality and you cannot imagine a different morality. The morality we all know is the only morality that is. It is as indomitable as two and two making four.
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy." -- George Orwell, 1984
Objective reality insists on certain continuities. Two and two making four is consistent with doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. The only way to do away with the golden rule is to do away with the stubborn, concrete reality of arithmetic.
"For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” -- George Orwell, 1984
Reality is a creature. It is created. If there is no God, there is no objective reality, only the reality which is currently in fashion. If according to Cartesian coordinates "we think therefore we are," our thoughts then can also unmake all that we are. If reality only exists in the few square inches between our ears, then the one who owns the space around our heads, controls the world.
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” -- George Orwell, 1984
The multiplication table paves the path of liberty. The fact that four fours makes sixteen is the basis of all freedom. If four fours is not sixteen, there can be no freedom. There can be no assurance of consistency. If nothing is truly immutable, then everything is malleable and that world is not free to be whatever shape it wants. In fact, it cannot hold any shape. One may argue that it is the most free because it can be whatever shape it desires, but, the fact is, it has surrendered all freedom to hold any shape in particular. It cannot remain in any shape. It has forfeited solidarity for the sake of subjectivity. By binding itself to abstraction, it prohibits itself from anything concrete. To be free in that sense is to be enslaved to shapelessness.
"Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer." -- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
We are approaching the days were battles will be fought over the basic realities under our feet. The fact that grass is green, skies are blue, fires are hot, and digits are fixed will be debated over blows. And yet the law of non-contradiction is indisputable. To be struck in the face is not the same as to not be struck in the face. The very battle over it verifies the fact.
"You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end." -- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
There is no freedom in redefining the world according to our preferences. It cannot be done. Freedom is only found in submitting to the elected realities designed by the one and only immutable, inexorable God. Inventing new freedoms is a surefire way to fall into old slaveries. If you insist on freeing the world from the tyranny of basic sums, you release it to the freedom of forced labor camps where two and two are said to make anything the taskmaster insists upon.
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