Dogmatic Circles and Birds of Play

The mind is infinite -- or might as well be, because I guarantee you'll never find its edge in your lifetime -- and yet, people choose to live in more or less confined spaces of idolatry, sub-ideology, and convention.

Frankly, that's okay for most people. But not for the Transdimensional Raccoon, who prefers to frolic in the wide open spaces of the wild godhead beyond the subjective horizon.

The auto-enclosure referenced above seems to be an evolutionary holdover, or nul de slack, that once served a purpose, in that early man was naturally distracted by the urgent necessity of mapping the world in some kind of predictable way that bore immediate fruit.

In short, he was preoccupied with survival, both with his own and that of his genes; or food, reproduction, and killing enemies. Hunters hunted and gatherers gathered, and it must have worked because here we are.

There was a time when anthropologists were of the universal belief that mankind developed in stages, e.g., from primitive to agricultural to technological; or from myth to metaphysics to science; or from agrarian to capitalistic to communist; or totemism to polytheism to monotheism; etc.

But this way of looking at things became unfashionable in the 20th century, largely due to the racism that attached to certain theories of development, along with a conflation of genes and culture. I suppose this pathology reached a peak of virulence with Nazi theories of race, but the left will never fully abandon racist ideas so long as they translate to political power.

As a result of the new academic correctness of the 20th century, to suggest, say, that some backward tribe in Africa was "primitive" was -- and still is -- to brand oneself a racist.

But in recent years the left's stranglehold on permissible thought has been weakening, so it is possible to perceive and talk about the human reality beneath an absurd dogma that pretends all cultures are equally wonderful except our own, which is uniquely bad (e.g., Sick Societies, Race And Culture, The Culture Cult, Constant Battles, or War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, to name just a few off the top of my head).

Yes, the intellectual red tide is turning, but just as in natural selection, we'll pretty much have to wait for the old demagogues of the left to literally die out and be replaced by a new and nonself-hating generation of the intellectually open and bi-curious (i.e. horizontal and vertical textual orientation).

Only a handful of leftists ever grow out of their adolescent rebellion, and most of these heels will actually dig them in when faced with corrective feedback from reality, e.g., Obama. He is far too narcissistically invested in his fanciful worldview to adjust it to the dictates of reality, which is why we are all being held hostage to one man's immaturity.

So long as there are millions of others to help Obama prop up the fantasy, he can ignore the feedback. But now that his own base is crumbling, we'll see him become increasingly confused about what to say and how to act.

Conversely, it is so liberating to simply speak truth and let the world be the world!

This post wasn't supposed to be about politics per se, but rather, about the snares of thought that capture and enclose the spirit. Then again, for a secular person, politics can be one of the biggest snares.

In Into the Silent Land, Laird tells the story of four Kerry blue terriers he saw in the course of his regular walks. Three of them raced through the open field with "bounding energy, elastic grace, and electric speed," but the fourth stayed close to the side of the owner and ran around in tight little circles.

One day he asked the owner about this behavior, and he responded that prior to his acquisition of the dog, "it had lived practically all its life in a cage and could only exercise by running in circles. For this dog, to run meant to run in tight circles" (emphasis mine).

Let us stipulate that some men aren't dogs, and that they can think, which is to say, run around in hyperspace. But most men seem to run around in tight little circles near their ideological owner while wagging their fingers. Why is that?

Could it be that they are in a cage? Or on a leash? And neutered?

If you will open your Coonifesto to page 21, you will read that the author did not write the book for the absurcular intellectual, tenured ape, or cognitive wanker bee. There are millions of books for them, and they don't need one more bar on the cage.

Rather, the book is addressed to the "free-range spiritual aspirant" and not the "unfertilized egghead of contemporary hyperspecialization." The same is a fortiori true of the blog. The whole innerprize is in a spirit of child-like play, and one of the purposes of play is to vault oneself out of time and into the timeless.

"For indeed we are free, as the Psalmist insists, 'My heart like a bird has escaped from the snare of the fowler." And in the words of Dante, "Reason, even when supported by the senses, has short wings" (both in Laird).

Although that would be a good place to end, one more point that expands upon what the Poet just said.

In the epigraph to his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge expresses the idea that "it is good that human beings contemplate invisible things in the universe 'lest the intellect, habituated by the trivia of daily life, may contract itself too much and wholly sink into trifles'" (cited in Piereson).

So, do the myth, sheeple.