Everything has led us to this point.
If there's to be any useful change we must acknowledge that the whole thing is corrupt.
"What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. There was a time when the machine ate in moderation…and what it ate was replaced. Now the machine is eating faster… much faster than it can be replaced…. The machine is eating it all."
William S. Burroughs
As the current Idiocracy plays out, exposing in each detail just how far those dedicated to the Big Lie will go to deny reality; we need to begin to recognize how deep the rot goes. Everything that preceded this moment has led up to it. The accumulation of a willingness to go along with so many little lies has brought us to this point.
David Bohm, when asked how far the corruption goes gave the example that when we find a pipe pouring pollution into a river it makes no sense to try to “clean” the water without first doing everything we can to turn off the source. The source, in his estimation, has been Thought and its every effort to consistently break every relationship and destroy every possibility of connection, of the workings of Love. What he and Krishnamurti referred to as Dialogue. A term Thought has managed to trivialize as it has everything else it touches….
This moment is a lesson on both counts. If we fail to see how every aspect of Thought has brought us to this point we continue to fall under the thrall of Thought; refusing to see the whole and insisting on fortifying binary divisions. We also refuse to see that no manner or number of “discussions” can bring us to Dialogue. Discussion; at its root which it shares with Concussion; and as David Bohm also pointed out; is a hammering, a breaking into pieces. Discussion, argument, “reasoning,” are all based upon a corruption brought about by Thought. Only Dialogue can bring us to any awareness and coherence vis a vis what-is. The Big Lie is the culmination of everything Thought has brought about and only through Dialogue can we unravel the binds this keeps us tangled in so we can approach navigating coherence.
“Revolution” has never accomplished what it has set out to do. Its record is as littered with “unintended consequences” as any reactionary movement. While its language aims to bring us to a “fresh start;” it is bound to fail by the literal manner of its methods. As in Bohm’s example, it attempts to “clean the river” without turning off the pollution at its source. Looking to fit reality to an ideology, no matter what one’s goals, can only bring about another turn of the wheel. It does nothing to lessen the tracks left by those wheels.
Inquiry and Dialogue deal directly with the source of our corruption and undoing.
Thought maintains that breaking down wholes and isolating abstractions leads to “success.” Is it any wonder that thousands of years of practice has led to a point at which everything is broken?
Why do I put so much effort into exposing the failures and hypocrisies of “The Good Guys?”
From within Thought it is impossible not to divide. Whatever and whoever we “agree with;” is Good. The rest? “It’s their fault!”
The nasty-ones; those consumed with active hate as a result of their deep-seated self-loathing; don’t care about hypocrisy other than as another weapon. To them, everything is a weapon, or it is useless in their estimation. They are brimming with a clarity that convinces them while easily appearing as an obvious projection and fierce rejection of their own Shadows by anyone outside of their delusions.
The “Good Guys,” and “Gals,” as they might put it; are consumed with revulsion at any appearance of unfairness. Any appearance…. Their self-image is built upon a conviction that they are “good.” Defending this image trumps reality for them just as much as refusing to accept their Shadow does for their “opponents.”1
So long as we are stuck in the battles between these equally bankrupt modes of existence; equally dependent on the foundational errors of Thought; we are condemned to a struggle with no end but final destruction.
We are all damaged. The results of what we call History. The workings of “civilization,” have made this a certainty. Every step of this journey has turned away from any option but the prison of an Edifice of Thought. Each “advance,” a further distancing from any workable, innate form of being. As individuals, we may, with great difficulty, find hints and fragments of ways that are outside these walls; but there is a near-impossibility of communicating this. Certainly in any broad sense.
Thought maintains that breaking down wholes and isolating abstractions leads to “success.” Is it any wonder that thousands of years of practice has led to a point at which everything is broken?
There are no means of communication that exist as institutions that have not always had this Thought-derived purpose from the start. That they have reached a point at which all that they can do is obfuscate is not a fault. It is a fulfillment of their purpose. It’s easy to take scraps of evidence of this and focus on “our enemies’” contribution. We see very real conspiracies; C.I.A., or “Deep State,” or some “Global Cabal.” While there have been; and continue to be; conspiracies; focusing on them; dividing them up into categories, of agreement or disagreement or plausibility; distracts us from the deeper point. These are all institutions. Segments and fragments of the Edifice of Thought that brought us to this point.
One of the most difficult aspects to fathom in all this is that Thought; including every ideology, mythology, fantasia; does not just exist “in our minds.” It has created and is embedded in the physical circumstances of our lives. We tend to glance off this realization with quips like, “Human Nature,” or “The Human Condition.” We conflate the fact that we are immersed and cannot easily escape this physical structure with the belief that it is what is eternal and cannot be changed. When what we are actually doing is just continuing to react within the constraints with which Thought has bound us.2
There is a profound and disturbing disconnect within every public sphere today that grows out of an inability we have to imagine how profoundly our situation is changing. This results from the connection between extreme power and incoherence. This could be a way to understand how Nemesis works…. Those who ally themselves with the fiction of power and focus all their capacities on chasing its fantasies are bound to be incoherent. As a result what they do becomes Anti-Coherent.3
Perhaps the most universal aspect of the barrage of revelations we find ourselves amidst is a sense of disconnection. I’ve found, in myself and those I relate to, that there had been an expectation that, in the absence of provable malfeasance; institutions and authorities and those in positions of power shared some basic empathetic connection with the rest of us. It may have been confusing so long as they hid their intentions behind even the flimsiest veils of obfuscation. Now? They proclaim their inhumanity and embrace their broken natures.
We’ve been here before. A lot has to happen to get past this next, …, as they say, “kinetic stage.” Then what?
Well, this is where the seed for the next unraveling lies in plain sight ready to germinate once again. The “Good Guys,” unwilling to the very end to admit any fault, rush back into “Normalcy.” We don’t need to look any further back than the road-kill speed-bump that was our last administration to see how this has worked.4
Part of this is an impossibility to recognize that one’s favorite authorities might not actually feel any reciprocity of responsibilities. Even now, the party “out of power” continues to play at pretending to care. Only lacking “grass-roots” donations to be able to, at some distant point in an idealized future, make things right.
This battle between those stuck in projection laced memory and those stuck in self-serving fantasies of an idealized future is killing us all.
It’s not “their fault.” As soon as we insert an other into it we guarantee that it will remain our fault.
These are both reactions to the illusion of time, psychological time, as David Bohm would say.
Jeffrey Shampnois’ recent essay, Time and Timelessness, looks at this from a different starting point and in a different way.
The fault in both forms of “reasoning;” whether looking backwards or forwards; is in the breaking down of existence in a way that ensures that attention will remain at the one “place” where existence, …, exists!
As Lucas Sacasas points out,
The truth of things lies in our not-forgetting or our remembering.
Please read both these essays. They relate to this text in a kind of slippery, rhyming, sharing of an inhabited space….
We are stuck between one side that is unwilling to forget. Their grievances rushing to send us all into a bad copy of an ill-remembered past. The other side; unwilling to remember their complicity; are eager to rush off into fantasies they refuse to surrender.
There is no way through. This is a trap. Any path that ignores the double-bind at the heart of Thought’s Dominion can only deepen the damage and inflate suffering and misery for all.
In the Twentieth Century calls for anything approaching this view could only be seen and, were easily rejected, from within the bind itself. Even the Cubist Moment and Krishnamurti and Bohm’s Inquiry and Dialogue were not enough to break through the our collected blindness to Proprioception.
Proprioception, this awareness of awareness, has provided the one aspect that could help us potentially see through Thought. It’s only Proprioceptively that we can recognize the futility of remaining within a double-bind. As well as warning us off the other, traditional, remedy; the fragmentation of the self in a desperate attempt to destroy any awareness that made the bind visible in the first place. Another refraction showing us the two warring camps, fabulists and fantasists.
To return to Burroughs’ description of our Predicament; it is the fact that the machine is eating everything and that there are no remaining reservoirs to keep the whole thing turning that now provides us with a perspective that makes this possible. We have nowhere left to hide from our delusions.
This is, as with any analysis, an oversimplification. It’s here to be taken as a potentially illuminating observation. Not as a prescription.
For a long time, this has only been visible as a sensation of a need for a free space. Somewhere where we could “start-over.” This is the path towards falling into Utopian thinking. The warning is right there in the name, Utopia: Nowhere.
This way of perceiving the Edifice of Thought as both physical and “real;” and as a construct whose structure “obeys” certain rules; might be more useful…. It also seems to resonate with the following note on Anti-Coherence….
Anti-Coherent, anti-coherence. This feels like a new concept…. Let’s see what might come of this….
If we did want to go back a little further just look at the so-called De-Nazification of Germany and the embrace of so many Nazis within the new American Century’s most esteemed institutions, from Madison Avenue to NASA.