I’m circling around, looking for an understanding. I input the Ubu Roi, indexed it to the Wall Street protests, but something is missing. I am going to type out loud.
Meaning is a sort of structure, that is partly conscious and partly unconscious. If you are to act with order, you must accept and internalize basic principles. Having acted with order for a period of time, the structure of your self and your life becomes internalized. You create your self over a period of time of making decisions using rules you choose. Commonly, those rules are those of your parents, more or less, and societies succeed and fail depending on the quality of those rules, and whether or not they have been transmitted successfully. Right now, it is quite unclear that the virtues of our grandparents and great grandparents are getting passed along to kids growing up now. I see a lot of kids growing up “iPod”. Can I call them i-Pod people? That construction warrants a bit of attention. Read it again.
When you are lost, you do not know what to do because you do not know what you are supposed to do, externally, and you do not have the courage to accept the responsibility of creating your own reality and self. Now, confusion is a common enough human condition.
What hurts is not confusion, but pessimism as to the possibility of ever finding an answer. Not knowing, and not thinking knowing is possible are two different things. The second leads to a cessation of the virtual chase. You become a boat crossing an ocean that turns off its engines, despairing of the existence of land.
This is a very dangerous place. It leads to all sorts of mental disorders. We are meant to be always in motion. Even meditation has as its purpose motion towards a certain perceptual state.
Now, in the first stage of ontological illness, as I call this, you fill your mind with trivia. One could plausibly view our entire modern entertainment culture as existing to fill the minds of people who don’t want to think about anything. Video games do this, zombie movies do this. Pot does this. Raves do this.
You see these people: they are fat, eat too much pizza, are pale, and just not robust in any significant way. Often they are pierced and tattooed, with matching attire. Their zeal for life is muted by too many credit cards, life under artificial light, and input from the culture they consume that just aren’t healthy.
Given the intellectual presuppositions I mentioned above, which normally exist in tandem with materialistic conceptions of life anchored in orthodox Darwinism, and which reject God, this is not a self correcting system. This is not a self organizing system, since organization begins with the idea that organization is POSSIBLE, and everything they do mutes and leaks out any energy that might build in that direction.
The next step is hatred, and this is where the conflation of moral pessimism and Leftism becomes dangerous. Anger is a reason to live. It provides energy, but it is like animating a corpse. You are moving, you are there, but you are not ALIVE. You don’t actually feel well. You just haven’t yet killed yourself.
As I look at Wall Street, I see some people there who are likely genuinely principled. I saw one wanting to end fiat money and fractional reserve banking. Amen to that. Another was condemning the Bank of International Settlements (which by the way has deflationary monetary policy planned starting about 2015: put that in your planner): Amen to that.
But the simple fact is Wall Street doesn’t care. Those guys in the corner offices making $10 million a year: they are laughing. These protests will not do ANYTHING.
What will make the most difference over the long haul is an informed electorate. Accurate information is the biggest enemy everyone faces who wants to abuse and defraud ordinary Americans. The bankers do fine on the left and the right AS LONG AS the PEOPLE ASSUME that their party is fixing things. They can only claim this to be the case as long as the people are ignorant. Given knowledge, all bets are off. Who could have guessed a Republican front-runner would be talking about putting the Federal Reserve back under the control of the Executive, where it used to be? This is real progress.
Getting closer on processing my thoughts; not quite there yet.