Monday, September 2, 2019
I don’t know that I have ever fully realized till now how closely the rise of fascism is connected to the inadequacy of liberalism, which stems from the secularist materialist fallacy. There being no center for society to hang from, the structures of unreason try to provide one. Communists, fascists, liberals, conservatives, all try, all fail. Yet we can’t go backwards – as Jung said, the gods never reinhabit the temples they abandon. So what is to provide a center?
Guys? Do you do politics and society, or just individuals?
We try to do practical, and working on the individual is usually more practical than pretending to solve social problems, because that usually winds up advocating this or that panacea. We can talk politics and society if you wish, but we will do it in our context, not in the play-pretend context you are used to seeing. Our context includes humans as
- 3D and non-3D being (subject to internal forces and forces that manifest as external);
- individuals who are in reality communities (living minds past present and future, and therefore passions past present and future).
How can representations of man as homo economicus or homo faber or any other specialized, truncated, parodies of the human experience serve as adequate guides to social thought? Yet many ideologies of your time are still based hopes of social control or social liberation; in division among factions rather than in inclusion as part of a polity.
The New Soviet Man and the Thousand-year Reich of Aryan superman didn’t turn out too well.
No, and neither did any other model that was supposed to reshape society to employ forces not understood or even suspected. The basis of any social movement must necessarily be incomplete, and to some degree self-defeating and at best a poor make-do. If you can’t understand the situation, you can’t prescribe remedies, and if you can only act according to how strongly you feel certain, than as times continue to deteriorate, the proposed remedies will become ever more simplistic and fanatical.
It’s all pretty dismal, at the moment. Pro- and anti-Trump forces are making absolutely fanatically exaggerated claims and denunciations. Each is looking to the imminent downfall of the other, and blaming it for everything wrong, and conceding nothing in the way of self-criticism. They are, as far as I can tell, more ignorant than ever, because listening to only what they already agree with, and leaving no part of their minds open to the small still voice that says, “well, maybe.”
And you do see why?
Because we have little idea what the actual facts are. We have been lied to for so long, and are being lied to from so many directions, that there are “facts” enough to support any half-assed theory you care to name. People are ignorant of history,, and even what they know, they may misinterpret because of the poisoning of the sources of facts. If they hear something they would rather not be true, it is instantly “fake news” and that’s the end of it. And the problem is, we are inundated by fake news, too, only miraculously it comes only from the sources people already disbelieve, never from those they have decided to believe.
But there are deeper reasons than these. We repeat, no one can understand what is going on if they look at it through inadequate filters. You detect a signal more by filtering out noise than by your reception of anything and everything. Without a filter, it’s all noise. And the more unconscious the filter, the more the person mistakes the signal received for truth rather than construct. This is why some of the most closed-minded people are convinced that they are open-minded and open to correction. They never see any need to be corrected, since no contrary evidence ever gets through the filter.
True reform comes only through individual work on oneself. No matter what else you do or try to do or want to do or wish you could do, your level of being will determine your effect on the world. A social moment made of people with a cartoon image of the forces involved may amount to very little, in fact, will often serve chiefly to rouse the forces of opposition. Individuals quietly working on themselves, whether with others socially or not, may actually accomplish more constructive reform. Remember, the world is one thing, invisibly connected by millions of threads. This is true whether or not you believe it or are aware of it.
So, pro- or anti- gun-control legislation won’t bring utopia?
You are welcome to try. And so with any other measure that is advanced to be an item of faith, or a panacea. You can’t produce true meaningful reform by pounding water with a hammer, no matter how vigorously you pound.