Get the First Principles Right…and All Else will Flow Clearly

By Charlie Johnston

I have always been a big believer in what I call “First Things,” foundational principles which you then use as your interpretive template on all extrapolations. (Imagine my delight when, in 1990, the late Fr. Richard Neuhaus founded First Things Magazine – a profoundly orthodox Judeo-Christian publication that often has profound intellectual depth and heft!) When you get the first things right, everything starts falling into place elegantly and you have a solid foundation on which to build a coherent, consistent intellectual palace. It also gives you early alert against seductive errors. If something does not fit, either it is errant or your foundation needs serious work. Get it right and, by its very nature, you are constantly both testing and fortifying it.

It requires that you ruthlessly challenge your own beliefs and assumptions, including your unconscious assumptions, which are just prejudices (though you don’t know it, at first). You lay those bare by constant internal attacks on your own belief systems, with unflinching candor. If you do that well, what survives this test of examination is brutally strong – and you can speak and act with great confidence.

If, however, you are given to taking small data sets and leaping to large conclusions, fueled by the vanity that whatever your latest whim is MUST be right, it is a formula for unending and ever-deepening error. Many true things are counter-intuitive. Too many minds see a small trove of data, make a potentially insightful connection, and think that it MUST be true. I garner such insights and usually think, it MIGHT be true. Time for more ruthless examination. Use plain, but precise, language in the effort. Do not suppress a nagging doubt – chase it to the end. I do not mind error. We are mere mortals and error must come. I HATE persisting in error because of foolishly and vainly thinking I must be right. That is not a strength, but a weakness. Persisting in it will prove you a blowhard.

As Shakespeare said in Julius Caesar, “There is a tide in the fortunes of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” The nagging doubt, the flaw in your conclusions, if not fully examined, are the flood tides that you are omitting – and will lead to petulant intellectual shallows. The miseries will be the constant evidence that you are not nearly as smart as you want to be.

When I was in daily public media, I knew I could not avoid mistakes at times. But my ethos and discipline was that as soon as I found I had erred, to proclaim it louder than the original error. Doing that stings, even when it is your ethos. It also prods you to research hard enough to make errors few and far between. Thinking that if you don’t mention your errors makes them go away and people don’t notice is just anesthesia for the reality that people are progressively assessing you to be a blowhard – because they do notice, even when you pretend not to.

Fortunately, God has given us an internal compass on right and wrong, so you don’t have to adopt this discipline. Unless, of course, you aspire to be a thought leader. Then, if you don’t adopt this discipline, you not only become a blowhard, but you disable your own internal compass. Eventually, it will not operate at all – and you grow farther from both God and your fellows.

*********

Three years ago, at a field day, a very enthusiastic woman asked me what we were going to do about the Jews. I asked what she meant. She told me they were the source of most evil in the world, lying to gain sympathy about a holocaust. In astonishment, I told her of course the Holocaust happened. She asked me why, if that were so, did Dwight Eisenhower not mention it in his memoirs, since he was the commanding general. I responded in even more astonishment that, of course he spoke about it – and at some length. She insisted he did not. I asked her if she had read his memoirs. She faltered and said, no, but a friend had told her. I told her I had read them; that, in fact, Eisenhower is the man who ordered his troops to film the conditions he found so no idiots in the future could deny it…and informed her that CORAC would never become an anti-semitic organization.

I got a few emails from people telling me they hope I wise up and get enough knowledge to know how evil the Jews are. Actually, now some are trying to tell me it is not the Jews, just the evil nation of Israel. Of course, Israel is the only country in the Middle East that guarantees freedoms to its resident non-Jewish citizens. About 10 percent of the Knesset (Israel’s legislature) consists of Arabs and Muslims.

I am well-versed in the ancient and modern history of Israel. If I ask some of these critics about some very basic facts, it is all crickets. They inform me how stupid and uninformed I am and they do not even know basic information. Frankly, I feel like an Oxford Don being lectured to by Kindergartners. Some even link to articles written by people they admire who I long ago dismissed as second or third-rate thinkers. I generally keep my thoughts on such things to myself unless it is truly critical – because many of the second and third-raters do have occasionally useful insights…and I don’t want to browbeat people or make them feel they must think as I do. I’m re-thinking critiquing the second and third-raters, though. Some of them are doing more damage than I realized.

But I will say this: you are completely flubbing it if you think I take the position I do because I am stupid and uniformed because I do not share your shallow animus. Read about 40 more dense tomes on the subject – including seven or eight contemporaneous with the founding of the Zionist movement a little over a century ago – and do a serious survey of world history and you still won’t catch up to me, but you’ll be in a league where you are capable of speaking coherently on the subject.

Yes, I know I am being very arrogant on this – but not half as ignorantly arrogant as those who are writing me these days. I didn’t say what I have said to prove who is smarter, anyway. I wrote to give you all a solemn warning that Jew-hatred, however you want to justify it, is the snake in your garden. It will, at best, dramatically increase your time in purgatory. And it hints at a temperamental penchant to seek out shallow, minor fallacies, then magnify them into towering truths. That is deadly, too.

*********

More than a few people have asked me to publish the protocol I used to successfully knock down my prostate cancer. I won’t do that, in part, because it is illegal for someone without a formal medical credential to publicly offer medical advice. I suppose I could figure out a way to explain what I did without it being construed as advice, but I still won’t do it. Perhaps surprisingly, I largely agree with the law.

With the Covid fiasco, I boldly recommended that authorities emphasize the use of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, which they were, instead, trying to ban. It was easy to do that as both have minimal and relatively innocuous side effects. It was easy to publish charts showing that countries and regions that focused on either got MUCH better results than countries that focused on the shots. While I danced around the line, I did not actually recommend publicly the use of Ivermectin, though anybody could easily figure out I favored it. During that period I had all manner of people recommend to me their preferred “miracle cure.” I spoke about next to none of these, because just a little research showed almost all had common and serious side effects such as kidney failure, blood poisoning, and death.

This was not a surprise to me, as I had long known that many, probably most, laymen make such medical decisions based on anecdotal evidence rather than scientific principles. You know…their Aunt Edna or Uncle Joe said…or they heard from a friend of a friend. Without knowing basic principles, medical experimentation is dangerous – often deadly so. Not one in a hundred laymen know that what is palliative for one person is damaging to another – and how to navigate that reality.

My biggest shock during Covid was not that laymen often count on unreliable anecdotal stories (that are also often apocryphal). Rather it was that a huge chunk of the medical establishment does the same, almost equally ignorant of actual science – and with more arrogant condescension. When you get government regulators involved in these modern times, at least in this case, they actively try to suppress treatments that are effective while pushing approaches that are deadly. As a clever wag said, what you get when you mix science and politics is…politics. It was a repudiation of both honor and intellectual rigor – and a betrayal of the general public. If betrayal became permanent policy, I would eventually have openly defied the ban on any but the credentialed class offering public counsel. I think, though, that the Trump Administration is trying to return objective science to the issue rather than political narratives to build control. If that is the case, we would be much better off reforming the existing system – knowing that some doctors and public health authorities are not nearly so concerned with public health as they are about having an unwilling public they can force their pet experimental theories on.

As much confidence as I have in Robert Kennedy as HHS Secretary, if I had my druthers, I would still eliminate and salt the ground over the remains of most County Public Health Depts. in the country. Almost every one of them went with narrative control over objective science – and did enormous damage to people they were supposed to serve – but sought to rule.

*********

One of the things that quickly emerged in my thoughts during the Covid fiasco was that this could be a means by which God would cull the enemies of faith from the human herd. It is tough – and I don’t think I have spoken of it publicly before. Again, I wrote here on Dec. 23, 2020 that the Covid shots would likely be the greatest medical disaster in history. All the peer-reviewed studies now are showing how it has increased myocarditis, cancer, and a dramatic rise in all-cause deaths…and the establishment (medical, media, and gov’t) is just beginning to admit what many of us figured out early on. It did not escape my notice that the people who were most enthusiastically submissive to the deadly political narrative were those on the far anti-God left.

Many innocents were caught up in the confusion, though, initially trusting institutions and authorities they were once able to trust. There had to be a mechanism by which they could be healed once they saw what reality was – and how they had been betrayed. I contemplated deeply on Moses and the Israelites and God’s instruction to him to mount a brazen serpent; that all who gazed upon it and sought healing would receive. I was inspired to write the Brazen Serpent Prayer. Our prayer team, under the direction of Sr. Bear, extrapolated that to develop the Brazen Serpent Prayer Rosary. If you got the shots, either innocently or because you were coerced – or even if you have just repented of it all – please have recourse to these devotional items.

The initial thought is proving out, though. Remember when, after Trump and Robert Kennedy noted the link between Tylenol and childhood autism – a link which the CDC and the manufacturers of Tylenol conceded there was profound evidence for, TikTok and other social media were lit up with leftist pregnant women taking Tylenol to “own” Trump. I guess their babies’ well-being and health were a small price to pay for their need to show Trump.

It is bizarre that, in modern times, people do not consider themselves smart based on their knowledge, logic, and wisdom. Rather, they base it on which political team of “experts” they choose to follow – and they will follow them defiantly, even when compelling evidence and data show they are dead wrong (pardon the pun). It is an utterly mindless and self-destructive definition of “smart.” I was taken by this essay by Anne Hendershott in the American Spectator. It began as a reflection on the shootings at Brown University, but ended as a deep contemplation on the wages of hubris, vanity, jealousy, and resentment. Hendershott will be someone I look for and read regularly now.

As brilliant as he is, the devil’s great weakness is that he can’t resist doing long term damage to his plans in exchange for the pleasure of venting a little transient spite at humanity. I clearly see demonic influence in so many people who are now doing the same. You know that if Donald Trump cured cancer, we would shortly thereafter see great crowds of people carrying signs reading, “Hands off our cancer!” and “Leave our cancer alone!” Their rage and spite has unhinged them – and so the devil leads them defiantly to their own destruction. They will NEVER accept healing and grace from people – or the God – that they hate.

*********

Merry Christmas, everyone. On Christmas Eve morning, I will reprint my story, The Pivot of Civilization and then on Christmas morning, I will reprint Joseph’s Way. Both are contemplations that involve the Christmas story. I like them – and like to revisit them every year at this time. I wrote Joseph’s Way 29 years ago. I wrote The Pivot of Civilization 14 years ago, mostly while walking through Louisiana during my pilgrimage. I hope you like them, too.

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim

Donate to CORAC!

Join the Conversation!

The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)

18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552

Dallas, Texas 75252