Look at the modern world and
consider that it is a de-evolution. A regression. Examples of progress are mapped over the
faults. If they are not in fact
themselves faults: technology, democracy, equality – go down the line. Maybe some good. What is good and great and is an exemplar of
our modern world is, it turns out, unjust and perverted.
Perhaps this is manifested in the
healthcare system of the US. For profit
(docs earn a pretty penny), big business, allied with the insurance and
pharmaceutical industries. Allied with
the soft
drink lobby. All in cahoots. This inversion is not to be fought against
though it is meant to be understood.
These are the shackles that define the outlines of our slave status, a
world where the slave permits the chains on one condition: that he may
criticize anything but the chains, i.e. that he has the right to live in a
fantasy, the chains untouched and ignored except for periodic perverse
maintenance done on the chains by the wearer in acts called voting, consumer
choice, patriotism, inclusiveness and the principled acquiescence to war.
That technology will deliver us
from the ills that it created is “magical thinking” as James Howard Kunstler says – though, well, erm,
okay I guess I don’t have a beef with term “magic”. It’s true.
Magic itself is not inherently good.
It can, in fact, be used to influence people to consume, to “buy into”
the status quo. We marvel at our own bedazzlement. We laud our actors who entertain us into a
state of distraction, whose fictions capture our imagination. We believe, or suspend disbelief, in the
ability of consumer goods to deliver a solid, seamless reality where product types
are improved each year and “coolness” may likewise be perennially purchased.
A bad myth, a celebration of
captiveness. Everything is
opposite. Constraining our life energy
into a safe standard conduit – it will never change; can’t I use this as a decisive
argument that utopias – where all are equal – will never, ever
materialize. To help realize that those
utopias by definition will never exist because their definition includes man,
groups of men and women . . . therefore mass behavior will exist. Might I use this definitive understanding to
do away with the moral pangs that want to turn an idea like magic into an
operative of some assumed good? Might I
still have compassion? Do I have to
scale the ideas of love, the good, and compassion into the redoubt of the
family or of the tribe?
A small thought that pops up, I will welcome it into the circle as it arises and make peace with it in order to nullify it.
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