First, I remember reading, when it was in the theaters, how some people would come away from it depressed, because they allegedly missed the beauty of Pandora. I would submit that what they missed was a meaningful sense of community, of connection with others, of a risk-filled but engaging life, and an overall sense of place and purpose.
Consider the scenes when they are effectively connecting, together, with the heartbeat of Pandora, first when they are trying to heal–Ripley, we’ll call her, since I forgot both the actresses name and her characters name–and then again when they transfer Sully’s soul from his first vehicle to his second. Everyone all together, in a deeply altered, emotionally engaged state.
I was dreaming last night about Germans singing in a beerhall. Someone started singing, and everyone took it up. Everyone of course knew the words, soon everyone was dancing, in a very happy, coordinated way, after someone pulled out an accordion.
Where is there anything like that in our culture?
The following dream, I was on a night out on the town with a couple hipsters, who had somehow mistakenly invited me. I committed social faux pas’, one after another, which is easy with people who are obsessed both with fitting in, and adhering to a convoluted and constantly changing social code, the very essence of which is constant exclusion of the slow and dense. In short order, of course, they abandoned me. I didn’t know which bars to go to on which nights, I wasn’t dressed properly, and I overall simply was not sensitive enough to their tribal niceties.
How do we belong in this culture? How? You can join a church, but how many of you, if you went to church, remember something other than a somewhat oppressive demand for behavioral conformity? Catholics may differ in this, actually, since I think Catholicism still builds community in a useful way, but I was raised a Southern Baptist, where in my personal experience at least, most of the laughter is fake.
I feel Fascism in the air. That is what Obama represents, particularly having tricked us twice: a sorrow and loneliness and an anger, and sense of futility, leading to a complete break with any sense of responsibility to use freedom responsibly, or even value it.
If you look at the Daily Kos, it is seething with angry, passive-aggressive, pseudo-hipsters (I say pseudo, because the truly cool, in my view, are not neurotic wrecks). They talk, at times, about love, and justice, and truth, but they don’t mean it. They don’t possess, collectively, a SHRED of actual empathy directed even at those–the poor, the dispossessed–that the claim to care about.
What they have is alienation, and a daily cause: a daily dose of directed anger, a socially sanctioned “Two Minute Hate”, in which they get to unite–to vaporize both their identities and sense of isolation–in a particular direction that is acceptable because it is served up by powers they recognize and accept as their masters.
I of course worry daily about this, about how to counteract a culture saturated with emotional disconnection; violent pornography and the objectification of people as sexual objects–typically women, but this can as easily be applied to women who have learned to think like men at their worst–that goes with it.
We see psychopathy lauded, tacitly and at times even openly (read to the end).
In my view, most of this stems from materialism, the sense that comes from materialism that this life is all we get, and that it is meaningless, and from the moral assaults that attend the embrace of socialism, which destroys all of the things we could internalize in the pursuit of beauty, virtues like fidelity, courage, honesty, empathy, love.
All virtues are suspect, at root, in socialism. If all people are equal–which is a definitional stipulation of egalitarianism–if nobody does better because they have chosen to be more virtuous, to work harder, to think and create more effectively, then the State must discourage all virtues but conformity. I have said this many times, in many ways.
Our target, then, in resurrecting what is rapidly becoming a culture of death (go to your local Redbox and see what people are watching), is attacking the invalid premise of materialism. It needs to be done not on a theoretical level, but empirically, and the renaissance needs to happen in the heart of the Academy.
I often get overwhelmed with ideas. I have many, many ideas, but like a typical dreamer I am not good at getting the proverbial goods out the door. I make no excuses, other than to point out that I spend more time trying to be useful for my community and world than the average 20 people out there, and that is likely being unfairly generous to the others (of course soup kitchen volunteering and the like is useful; but the roof is caving in).
Still, my current plan, which I have acted on by getting his book, is to summarize Cleve Backsters work in a short letter, and send out letters to various professors of biology, challenging them to try and replicate his work. The extent of the FRAUD which has attended mainstream sciences interaction with his work is breathtaking. A well respected scientist stood in front of the press some 40 years ago, and claimed that his experiment had only been tried once, had only worked once, and that in intervening years no effort had been made at a second chance. This is what is published at the Straight Dope.
And it is empirically wrong. He invited people in nearly weekly to observe what he was observing for DECADES. He did demonstrations on many of the major talk shows, like David Frost. He replicated his findings so many times, that he stopped using paper, and simply created an arrow and beeper to report unusual reactions. He got a heartbeat from an unfertilized egg.
Mainstream scientists do not know this. Simply because most of them are stupid and arrogant, does not mean ALL of them are. My letter will start something like : “Dear Sir, I style myself as a modern-day Diogenes, and am looking for one honest man. This letter is my lamp. . .
It helps to have a creed. I can’t quit. Hope is simply not a factor. I don’t know if success is possible or not, but I will try.