Normally, I aim to only write things that can be read in 50 years without much loss in value. This time, however, we have a unique event unfolding, and I feel compelled to give my take.
As a standing nation, the United States of America is one of the greatest shifts in politics that has ever transpired. It proved the theory that society could hold itself up without a king, and is the reason our aristocrats transitioned to become board members.
This founding and subsequent success, however, has created a few issues, one of which has shown itself with Charlie Kirk’s recent assassination. To uncover it, we need to look candidly at the circumstance itself.
The Circumstance Itself
This section is here to be sure everyone is on the same page. Media spin is a ubiquitous part of living in this fallen, broken world, so facts are surprisingly hard to achieve consensus.
Charlie himself was a remarkable personality, in the same spirit as people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. It was the rare quality of having a very high Extraversion mixed with extremely high Openness, high Conscientiousness, low-ish Agreeableness, and very low Neuroticism. Any of those elements missing wouldn’t have made him as potent as he was. Ben Shapiro, for example, is a tad lower Agreeableness, and it shows.
He did a lot of things, such as co-founding Turning Point USA when he was 18, and involved in quite a few activist events, including rallying young people to vote for Donald Trump. However, the event that created today’s circumstance revolves mostly around his recent memetic popularity with his online videos.
The videos were “greatest hits” from him touring college campuses. He’d have an open mic, and give students a chance to debate with him. Since the structure of leftism permits reasoning on very emotional thought patterns, many college leftists are terrible at critical thinking, and they become a public joke as they try to regurgitate what they felt from their teacher.
The shooter, by contrast to Charlie, is relatively unknown. We do know he engraved internet memes into the bullets he had, and he was intelligent enough (or supported enough by someone else) to pick a moment where security would have their guard down (a conservative campus in Utah). The memes would imply he may have had some sort of transgender/furry association, but the information is hazy and up for speculation by the media.
And, that leads us to why it happened.
Why It Happened
Charlie’s debating style seamlessly dovetailed religious and political reasoning in a form that was equal parts talent and skill. For example, he was very capable of reciting Bible verses to substantiate conservative political positions, and was often able to rapidly find logical flaws in whoever he was debating.
In particular, though, Charlie was shot on the subject of transgender rights. He essentially believed the Bible’s position on it: that all forms of homosexuality are a sin. He also believed in loving people in spite of what they do, and had no issue allying with them on political matters even while disagreeing on lifestyle.
But, I’m not here to argue whether Charlie should be honored or shamed: that’s what everyone else is talking about. I want to address a deeper issue.
The Deeper Issue
As I mentioned above, one of the great fallacies framed by the founding of the USA (and the West at large) is in how well-divided we place our thoughts:
- The Declaration of Independence asserts that man is given certain inalienable rights from their Creator, though they stop at which Creator. The Pledge of Allegiance continues this tradition (“one nation, under God…”)
- All the principles of our legal domains are sharply divided into small tranches, with each domain not being connected to others. Civil cases and criminal cases aren’t generally connected, for example.
The result of this is that we treat our lives like a separable mechanism, made of mechanical and interchangeable objects that simply need swapping out.
- Under penalty of treason, soldiers who fight in many portions of the military are forbidden from communicating what they experienced. They have to pretend their experiences didn’t happen to move on with their life.
- Intellectual property law carves out very sharp divides over what someone can do, which is the reason Disney makes garbage remakes while nobody else is allowed to even think of profiting off fanfiction over it.
- Even in your personal life, your job is treated as a place you take on a role, which you can then abandon and be authentic when you go home. If you’re perceptive, you’ve likely done the same for going to church and social events.
And, Charlie’s honesty and sincerity violates that. He is a Christian first, and politics come second. Now, he is present with God, and gets to see how God sees all of us. I’d love to hear how his political views have already changed so far, and expect I’ll get to ask him sometime soon.
Charlie’s religious devotion to Jesus Christ represented itself as a form of political activism, and it played out for him as martyrdom. The idea that a value can sit in one’s mind and leave the rest of the values unaffected is a vividly Western idea, and is vividly wrong.
Of course, there is a reason for that divide: it’s convenient for sin. It makes life easier if you can be a nice person at work while being a monster at home, or both juggle a paramour and your spouse in two different worlds. It makes unethical business deals easier to stomach, and gives you permission to work at protecting the image of the “good” side of your life from the “bad” side.
This is the exact opposite failing that the East represents. In their version of mysticism, everything is connected into a wibbly-wobbly association with everything else, to the point of futility over any individual element. For them, the network is too connected, while we suffer a failing of those connections altogether.
To live with an inner schism of politics and religion is absurd, and the same goes for any other sharp divides. It is impossible for everything we do to not subtly affect everything else we do.
Why It Matters
And, to spell it out, this means quite a bit for our daily lives.
Charlie Kirk is definitely developing a grassroots version of whatever that thing with George Floyd was about half a decade ago. I’ve heard that thousands of new chapters of Turning Point will be springing up soon, and Charlie has now become an icon for the political right in this entire event.
But, on the more practical end, we can’t live with the belief that our lives sit separate from other elements of it. Your sleep affects your job, which affects your diet, which affects your weight, which affects your attractiveness, which affects your marriage, which affects your kids, which affects what they will learn, which affects the future.
It doesn’t mean 30 more minutes of that late-night Netflix show will ruin your children’s future, but it will affect it by 0.01%. Two hundred more things of that minor severity is a 2% shift. Success is in the margins (i.e., 85% is passing, and we can only humanly get 86%), so any deviation could mean everything breaks apart.
It also means that your relationship with God defines your politics. Nobody can maintain leftism as a value system if they believe God is more powerful than the State, and nobody can live for themselves if they are constantly preoccupied with the Being that made all of us.
But, it doesn’t start with helping the beggar on the side of the road. It starts with confessing your sins to those you’ve wronged. God values obedience more than sacrifice, and good works in one place don’t remove the wrongs we’ve committed elsewhere.