Wednesday, August 09, 2006

On the Fraudographic Monopulation of Hiz'story

I never really know what to write or say in advance, some days more so than others. Sometimes I just begin with a fragment of a thoughtlet, somewhat like a little melody that I try to turn into a song. Other times it will be a couple of seemingly unrelated fragments that are juxtaposed, and my mission--should I choose to accept it--is to build a little bridge between them. This would be more analogous to being given a couple of random chords and trying to build a song out of them.

So long as we are alive, our lives are always going to consist of fragments, loose ends, unfinished business, unincorporated areas. Although we try to achieve unity, we never really do, or at least not for long, any more than we can achieve physical unity by having one big meal and getting up from the table for the last time. Just like our bodies, our minds and our spirits run along cycles. There is a rhythmicity and cyclicity to existence--you might even call it a metabolism--that is always converting experience into being. Or, to be perfectly accurate, some experiences are metabolized and incorporated (or in-spirited), while other experiences, for whatever reason, are not metabolized.

This may seem arcane to you, but it is at the very root of both psychopathology and of psychotherapy (and ultimately, history as well). Every therapy patient comes in with a range of things that are somehow part of them, and yet, not metabolized and harmoniously incorporated into their psychic substance. Different therapeutic traditions call them by various names--fixations, internalized objects, repetition compulsions, projections, vertical splits, etc.--but it’s always the same story underneath. The person is not unified. They are not whole. They exist in parts that are chronically at war with one another--somewhat like the world. Each part is relatively autonomous and has a will and an agenda all its own. The part will pursue its own interests, even if it means undermining the personality at large. It can sometime hijack and dominate the entire personality, which happens more often than you might think.

It is now well understood that problems with early attachment lead directly to struggles to metabolize experience later in life. It’s easy to see why. We don’t actually come into the world with the ability to metabolize our own experience, much less construct a coherent and unified autobiography. Rather, experience just happens in a bewilderingly unpredictable way, and a big part of parenting is to serve as the infant’s “auxiliary cortex,” a regulatory agent that the child will slowly import or “download” into his own neurology. Almost every form of psychopathology involves some failure of auto-regulation, whether of mood, of anger, of impulses, of self esteem, of basic security, of attachment, of trust, of bodily integrity, of self image, of identity (which goes deeper than self image), etc.

So although we cannot achieve any kind of static unity, we can manage a kind of dynamic unity through constant metabolism of experience. In my view, a genuine spiritual practice always revolves around deepening the experience of unity. Unity is one of the names of God, and religion is all about achieving ordered unity within the soul. God is the organizing telos toward which the human spirit is being drawn, and religion is full of lessons on how to enhance our own unity by orienting it toward that higher Unity.

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

The camera is a kind of eye. Just like the human eye, it lets in a bit of light in order to produce an image. Yesterday I tried to touch on the deeper meaning of the Reuters fraudography scandal, but is there a deeperer meaning as well?

To extend the photography metapohor, I will quote someone--probably Petey--who once said, “The time allotted to us is analogous to the shutter of a camera; it opens with our birth, allowing in the small amount of light we must work with before it closes and the universe vanishes. With that light we must enter our ‘dark room’ and develop our conception of existence--what we are, why we are here, and what is our relationship to the whole. There are pneumagraphs laying around that others have left behind--scripture, books, images and institutions. Some of them were successful in capturing the Light, others only darkness visible.”

George Orwell is responsible for the prophetic remark that “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

The left conducts a three-front ontological war against the Real. One front takes place in academia, where leftist hack-, flak-, attack-, and quackademics deconstruct history and assemble a version more to their liking.

Another front takes place over the future, in undermining the Being of Unity toward which humanity is drawn. This Being must be destroyed so that it can be replaced by a wholly unholy earthbound, leftist version of it. Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about, while for others the concept may be new, even somewhat bizarre. The great political philosopher Eric Voegelin referred to it as immamentizing the eschaton. It is what the left always does, because leftism is the anti-eschatological philosophy par excellence.

This is one of the primary reasons why secular progressives are so ironically named. They can never really be progressive, since their materialistic metaphysic denies meaningful progress at the outset. Scratch a leftist, and he will probably whine and sue you for a violation of his civil rights. But underneath the scratch, you will always discern a nostalgic, backward-looking metaphysic--the painful recollection of the Lost Entitlement of Infancy, the desire for a romantic merger with the Great Mother--only projected into the future.

This leaves the third front, the present. Nothing is more meaninglessly present than the mainstream media. You might say that they are the opposite of a good parent. Again, the good parent helps the child to interpret and metabolize experience, which otherwise comes at them in a bewilderingly complex and random way. But the MSM in its visual aspect simply throws decontextualized images at you, and if there is any narrative at all, it is a narrative that is imposed by the limitations of the medium itself. And what are those limitations? A reduction of the mind to the senses, or the realm of the intelligible to the realm of the concrete. It an assent to the ravages of immediacy, to paraphrase Richard Weaver. Ultimately the MSM is an attack on the intellect itself, and therefore, an attack on God (as the intellect capable of objectively knowing the degrees of being represents a “static revelation” of God).

So now the MSM has been busted yet again for perpetrating fraud on the present, for distorting the now for patently ideological ends--for why on earth would they try to manipulate us with even unmanipulated Hiz'moloch propaganda? It's still manipulation designed to serve the interests of the enemy.

This institutionalized fraud extends into the past, because it is the first draft of rewritten history--and into the future, because the emotional immediacy of these images serves to demolish the hierarchy of being and cause many people to be as confused about this war as Larry King. Last night I heard a snippet of his program. He was commenting on a debate that had just taken place between Alan Dershowitz, representing Israel, and James Zogby, as always, representing the terrorists. After it was over, the ever-clueless Larry wondered out loud--and one can assume he speaks for millions--”how do you figure it out when both sides are right?”

Bing-bing-bing-bing-bing! That’s exactly the point. To a leftist, that is the right answer. Why? Because it means that the the intelligibility of the present has been successfully destroyed. The rest is easy.

Time for human beings is not the mere abstract duration of physics, but the very substance of our being, the “form of inner sense." The soul is a mysterious point of potential freedom in space, while the human species is engaged in a sprint toward the realization of this freedom in historical time. History is really only one great cosmic event: the attempt to become conscious and return to God, opposed at every step by deterministic forces on the horizontal plane and by lower, anti-Divine ones on the vertical. Only humans can serve as a bridge between the higher and lower planes that are manifest in the outward flow of history. Indeed, this is our purpose: to nurture and grow the seed of eternity within the womb of time. --Me

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bob,

Excellent post. Thank you!

Gagdad Bob said...

amomoly? Today you are anomaly as well.

Anonymous said...

"I am an animaly" - fergus the cat.

But seriously - I have an excuse: a particuarly vicious full moon today (and last night)

Totally jangly, rattled, boxed-in. Some (not me)are hearing calliope music in their heads. (maybe a little bit me)

black hole said...

Hey Bob. Excellent, thought provoking post. You mention that the human soul is a locus of freedom that will serve as a bridge between the cosmos and a return to the Unified Being, and that human beings are on a "sprint" to return to unity.
The question is, what's the hurry? Why not allow evolution to meander along at its own pace and indugle its amusing setbacks like liberal ideology? Why must it be a "sprint?"
I understand the need to fight against that which retards and holds back humanity, either horizontally or vertically, but is there, as you imply, really any sense of urgency warranted?
Were going to get there, presumably, and I wonder if you had any thoughts on why, or even if, its important to rush forward.

Anonymous said...

Grant:

Because "that which retards and holds back humanity" is on the verge of starting a nuclear war.

Anonymous said...

Grant -

Human spiritual progress is not a matter of evolution. We're at the point where it's purely a matter of volition. In that respect, we can "devolve" (witness the jihadist culture of lack thereof) as well as evolve.

Point two - we do NOT have an infinite amount of time to get our spiritual act together. There comes a time - perhaps relatively soon - that those who fail to make the grade will be excused from the playing field and will have to take their show elsewhere.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the Roiters folks suffer from a group ego condition instructing them to myopically pull any heart string to make the day’s sale, regardless of the “big photo”. Any good ego worth its wait to grow old will relentlessly pursue the deadliest sins in lieu of facing its perceived annihilation. In this case, Reuters being replaced by another news service that makes the day’s sale instead. It seems punishing to “forgive them for they know not of what they do”. This is obviously a long-standing and deep-rooted human conundrum that only an exceptionally tough lesson will cure – it almost has me mindlessly downing popcorn on the edge of my seat – unless a choice is made to stop and look around…

Steve said...

"Perhaps the Roiters folks suffer from a group ego condition instructing them to myopically pull any heart string to make the day’s sale"

Or perhaps you're all making far too much of a simple mistake that has subsequently been corrected.

Anonymous said...

I've always wondered what a medulla would sound like if it could speak.

Anonymous said...

Would that make Nagarjuna a medullard?

Anonymous said...

Either that or a beige-green new age fruitcake slushy served in a bed of under-developed new age nuts.

Steve said...

If any of you would care to explain why my comment is not "cerebral" enough to exempt it from the resulting remarks, I'd be happy to read and consider what you have to say.

As I understand it, Reuters published a photograph that had been doctored in a fairly subtle way. I'm not aware of any evidence that those who chose to publish it did so knowing it had been doctored. When they became aware that it had been, they corrected it. So, how does this illustrate a widespread conspiracy on the Left to subvert truth with manipulative lies?

Anonymous said...

Hmm, I see what you mean, anonymous. A medulla entrapped in the limit cycle of a recursive autocatalytic neural network loop. Fascinating! Have you ever seen one escape from its self-limiting beige colored phase space, or is this a life-long condition?

Steve said...
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