Ontological Bridge Collapse, Reality Dwellers Left Stranded

So, if ideologies are just modern myths, this implies that myths are just premodern ideologies -- at least in the sense Voegelin is using the term. 

Thanks to a certain post-Christian spiritual sensoyboyity -- you know the type -- there's an awful lot of mythologizing of myth, but in the end, they're all just wrong. 

Certainly you don't want to exchange myth for actual science just to sprinkle some new age fairy dust over your pathetically disenchanted life. You can romanticize primitive peoples all you like, but there's nothing romantic about human sacrifice or body mutilation, pervert. 

(Speaking of which: next up in the reading list is a new compilation of essential writings of Rene Girard,  All Desire is a Desire for Being [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0241543231/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1).])

Obviously there is a correct way to re-enchant your life, but it's not via sweat lodges, crystal gazing, dream catchers, drum circles, laws of attraction, sacred geometry, oracle cards, past-life regression, power animals, vision boards, et al (https://doreenvirtue.com/2019/07/21/an-a-z-list-of-new-age-practices-to-avoid-and-why/).

Again, for Voegelin, what makes a myth a myth is its imputation of the extra-cosmic, transcendent ground of reality to some intra-cosmic thing: "It is myth when you tell a story of an intracosmic ground." 

As for all those modern and postmodern myths under which we labor, well, although they've all been discredited, the ongoing abundance of Conservative Fail is proof enough that winning every argument is utterly beside the point, and that "one must not be too optimistic with regard to the power of ideologies."

For example, the collapse of the Soviet Union did little to slow the train of neo-Marxian bullshit -- of its metastasis into every coroner of the corporate-media-journalism-academic death complex, AKA the Matrix, the Borg, the Blob, the endless Night of the Living Dead.

Just because they are moving, it doesn't mean they are alive; rather, it's just the ideological momentum that can

last a long while, because there is a vested interest in them. Every new generation is brought into them through college education, and it takes a while until they snap out of it. The college teaching level is usually thirty, fifty, or more years behind what is going on.

This implies that if you want to be completely up to date with the myths of 1968, by all means, attend college!

Good news / bad news, I guess. On the one hand, "nobody can be an ideologist if he is intelligent to any degree or a man of stature," but so what? No one ever called Joe Biden intelligent, much less a man of stature. 

Next up is an essay called Debate and Existence, which goes over much of the same ground as the previous lecture, but with Voegelin this isn't a bad thing, given the degree of difficulty of the material, plus repetition being the mother of pedagogy and all that. 

Let's start with the modest proposal that it is impossible to debate someone living in a different reality, to say nothing of the person who refuses to acknowledge that there is an objective reality. If we can't agree on this minimum standard, then there's nothing to discuss: 

Only if the partners to the debate accept as binding 'the matrix of reality' can such a debate occur.

First of all, let's not confuse the matrix of reality with what we call the Matrix, or what Voegelin calls the "second realities" that eclipse genuine reality. You've no doubt noticed that when debating one of these lo-fo NPC ideological zombies, it gradually then suddenly becomes clear that 

argument is not pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurks the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.

To be continued....