Keep to the Code

As I expressed sometime back, it seems to me that the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy of films does a smack-dab job of expressing what's wrong with the world.

People today are by and large profligate, promiscuous, and debauched. You may be thinking, "Wait a moment, Athos. You are trying to tell me that most folk are suffering from what the Roaming Catholic, Gil Bailie has said:

Promiscuity means the lack of standards by which to judge or sort out things. Psychological promiscuity ... is the kind of involvement in mimetic contagion and mimetic desire which reaches the point [that] the self becomes unstable, because of the multitude of its influences.

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. People are psychological promiscuous, profligate, and debauched for the epistemological reason that they have no "code" by which to live. Or, rather, they are done away with all such codex sources of certainty for a variety of reasons, usually all bad ones. ("I did it myyyy wayyy," "All paths are pathology," etc.)

In the ultimate film of Pirates of the Caribbean, "At World's End," we discover that there is, in reality, a "Pirates' Code" to which all the Pirate Lords subscribe. (If you have not watched it, too bad for you.) It is what binds the brethren together in a normative way.

Today, as our sad state of politics and economics declares, the only "code" adhered to is All for Me and Who cares about Thee. The Democrats, leaning as far left as I have ever seen, are taking government into a La-la Land of fiscal insolvency, Romantic utopianism, and power-mongering doubling rivalry with the Right. And the Republicans before them? No better: tight-gripped control of wealth in a tiny minority and ignoring of all problems caused by Capitalism run amok ... and doubling rivalry with the Left.

THEREFORE, be it resolved that there is indeed a "Code" - truly and not merely in cinematic tomfoolery. And any and all can and may find epistemological, anthropological, ontological, and soteriological certainty therein, me hearties. (Yo ho!)

You may find this Code here. And good company there is to be found there, too. It may feel like a beseiged Tortuga, but 'tain't - 'tis a place of great truth, goodness, and beauty. And one may actually learn how to navigate the ugly swells and squalls of the spirit of the age.