Monday, September 03, 2012

The Nightmare of Political Identity Disorder

Are we better off than we were four years ago?

I say yes. For one thing, unlike those folks, we aren't staring into the maw of a future with an empty suit occupying that vacant chair at the top. So we got that going for us.

But let's dig a little deeper and find out exactly where we were four years ago. It was here, in this post, which touches on thoughts and how they get that way, and on those political invertebrates we call "independents."

A few preluminaries before we begin. Like you, not all my thoughts come into the world fully organized and integrated with the rest. Rather, I have my share of strays, orphans and lone wolves that deserve to have their little moment in the sun, even if they can't make it into a full post. Open your Coonifesto, page 294, footnote 76:

"Evidently, we play host to about four thousand distinct thoughts in a typical day, one hundred million in an average lifetime. Now we know how many thoughts it takes to fill the average soul (I'd love to turn them off)."

In the case of my thoughts, I actually wish two things for them.

First, I would like them to be internally related, or to cohere into a unified "whole," or seven-dimensional view of the cosmos, both internally and externally.

Of course that is impossible, but one never stops trying. What's the alternative, to live with a hundred million independent thoughts cluttering one's mental space?

No, that won't do. It's no wonder people hold so tightly to bogus religions and ideologies such as Darwinism in order to lend a false coherence to their minds. It's preferable to the anxiety of being persecuted by all those independent thoughts flying about. But this is also what makes leftists, or feminists, or metaphysical Darwinists so brittle, so unable to take a joke at their expense.

True, the purpose of material science is to reduce multiplicity to unity, but only insofar as it pertains to the horizontal. In the effort to forge unity, it a priori reduces the vertical to the horizontal, so that it necessarily ends in a forced pseudo-unity and therefore a false religion -- a graven image.

Now, the second thing I wish for my thoughts -- and it is impossible in the absence of the first thing -- is for them to ascend higher toward their ultimate source, which constitutes the Life Divine, as opposed to the Death Material. Our consciousness does not come from "matter," except insofar as consciousness is first involved (as in involution) in the creation.

No, this is not to build a Tower of Babel, which would be analogous to trying to ascend in a mechanistic or linear way, whereas we want to do so in an organic and organismic way, which is impossible in the absence of the divine telos that meets us more than halfway.

As reader Susannah pointed out the other day, we till the soil, remove the weeds, plant the seeds, etc., but there is an x-factor to all organic growth that is well beyond our pray grade.

And spiritual growth is most assuredly organic growth, only on the vertical plane. If it isn't organic, then you will eventually be headed for a fall, back down to your true level of spiritual development, which will have an intrinsic degree of stability and robustness. Which might be what happens when we die, i.e., our true level of spiritual growth is revealed.

Wait, I just remembered. There's a third thing I wish for my thoughts, and that is for them to actually be mine. Because I'm sorry to say that the average person never even has an original thought in his entire life.

Rather, it has been my experience that most people simply inhale thoughts from the atmosphere, thoughts which are largely mimetic -- meaning in plainspeak that they merely think what others are thinking. (This is one of the reasons the left was so demonically prescient in taking over the educational system, so they could normalize abnormal thoughts and turn them into conventional wisdom enforced by political correctness.)

It is critical to bear in mind that thoughts come from two broad directions. That is, they can emanate from O; or, they can come from Ø. The former are what Bion called "thoughts without a thinker." The latter have been precogitated by someone else, and are like viral memes looking for a human host, where they can settle in, reproduce, and infect other minds. The cultivation of the Silent Mind is our best defense against them, in which we repel them from our center. Boo!

Unfortunately, this is what is presently going on with both campaigns. As we know, there are people who are even more confused than liberals, and these are called "independents" or "moderates."

I mean, if you don't even know whether you are a liberal or a conservative, you are either an ignoramus or a nutcase. It's like not knowing if you're a boy or a girl. Here's a clue: if you don't know whether you're a boy or a girl, you're a liberal. Chas Bono, for example, like Obama, spent much of his early life a broad. That makes him a liberal, not a sexual independent.

There is no atmospheric meme that could induce me to vote for a leftist, as I am opposed to them politically, spiritually, philosophically, scientifically, cosmologically, economically, morally, educationally, psychologically, linguistically, culturally, ontologically, aesthetically, hygienically, and in just about every other -ally.

And I hope that, after 1074 2022 posts, you can see how all of the above categories are organically related -- which goes back to my own attempt to organize my psyche horizontally and vertically.

So the next eight weeks of the campaign are not going to be aimed at you or me. Tactically, that would be a foolish waste of resources, wouldn't it? Rather, the main strategy must involve courting these so called independents -- who are actually quite dependent upon accident and contingency.

In a way, it is quite sad, because what is a human being? There are other definitions, but I've never found a better one than this by Don Colacho: what we call a person is "the permanent possibilty of initiating causal series."

Or in other words, man is a local branch of the First Bank of the Unmoved Mover that is God.

But the independent allows himself to be moved by ephemera, trivia, rumors, wild accusations, passing fancies, drive-by shoutings, etc. Which, in a way, makes him the substance of nothing.

5 comments:

Van Harvey said...

"I say yes. For one thing, unlike those folks, we aren't staring into the maw of a future with an empty suit occupying that vacant chair at the top. So we got that going for us."

Sorry, saw this and had to laugh. In a Des Moines park, there are statues of oddities, including this one of an empty suit, that is rapidly becoming known as "The Obama Memorial".

Another, which I don't have a public link for, but on facebook someone's got a picture of a chair soaring through the air over a shoreline and the caption "Days after Hurricane Issac, President Obama flies over to survey the damage."

julie said...

Van - re. The chair image, that literally made me laugh out loud. If nothing else, the empty chair has certainly inspired a great deal of levity...

Matthew C Smallwood said...

Yes, but if FOX has come to embody conservatism, and being a real conservative (like D. Cortes) is philosophically impossible to your modern sensibilities, it's nice to hide behind the "independent" label, which often than not, means "Leftist" anyway.

Matthew C Smallwood said...

Some good lines in this post. The "Are you a boy or a girl?" analogy is apt.

EbonyRaptor said...

For as maddening as independents are, at least they usually know who the candidates are. There needs to be another category for voting age citizens who are even more maddening - those who don't care enough to make an effort, or don't understand enough to care, or vote for the candidate they're told to vote for.

What could that category be called?

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