Abstraction, it occurred to me this morning, comes from a part of the Self that is not the Self. It’s in a different part of the house, or possibly a visiting guest.
One of my recurring obsessions is how Communism happens. We know how to live happily. We know how to create prosperity, and we have forms of political governance that allow everyone to be who they want to be.
And many people value this. But obviously most of our intellectuals don’t. Many, many people are deeply uneasy with freedom, with happiness, with a world where people live simple lives, have and raise children, grow old and die in peace. There is not enough of them in all this, no relentless focus on them.
And they can’t stand this. The goal, obviously, with the sort of abstraction they push on us is to glory and revel in the attention paid to them through the attention forced on the ideas they identify with.
But this whole thing is an emotional and psychological split. Any one of us is happiest in the moment, which is the OPPOSITE of abstraction.
It is not natural for any iterated/born/living being to be fully stable. We are systems in motion within certain orbits and limits, which can be changed with effort. Stasis is foreign to life.
And yet abstraction–consider math as the ideal, and perhaps the Pythagorean Theorem as the paradigmatic example–is always static, always unchanging.
If you look at abstraction as a snapshot of a moment in time, as it applies to the world, it is healthy. But when a passion arises to move the world INTO abstraction, with stasis as the goal–as for example has largely been achieved in Cuba and North Korea, which change little year to year, decade to decade–then that is profoundly pathological.
I like the Marvel movies, since they can deal in the mythic in modern times and modern terms. I really think Dormammu, from the Doctor Strange movie, is a good metaphor for Communism. Time stops. Change stops. Evolution stops. Perception stops. Every possible effort is made to turn people into mannequins, to create a stage play with no motion, which never ends because it never begins.
I am musing, but these are perceptions which I have spoken about in various ways over time, and I am very sure there is something here.
Communism, at root, is about an escape from time. It begins in abstraction–in a class struggle which never really existed, and which resolved itself in the end through mutual cooperation to mutual benefit–and ends by trying to suppress everything human in human beings.
Along the way functionally psychopathic people enjoy the pleasures of moral superiority, freedom from the accusation of hypocrisy combined with material wealth and its attendant possibilities, and the feeling of being in an exclusive tribal club.
Edit: obviously, if I posit Communism as an escape from time, then the fear of death easily follows as an underlying unconscious motivation. I have likely mentioned a friend of mine from high school who once commented that he wanted to live forever through socialism, through the work he put into building a “better”–as he inchoately imagined it, through what were no doubt many inaccurate and incomplete ideas–society.
I’m sure I have quoted or at least referenced William James, in the first few paragraphs of this first lecture that was published as the book Pragmatism, saying that one’s first metaphysical premises are not only relevant to being understood as a person, but that nearly everything else is irrelevant.
Obviously, he is speaking of one’s REAL, not pretended, beliefs, but I think he is absolutely right. People who think individual extinction is permanent will tend to want to find meaning in something outside of themselves, and in general the first thing they do is invent a new god called “Society”, into which they can pour what would have been a soul if they had one. That, or pleasure. Self evidently, Socialists not infrequently–perhaps indeed routinely or even habitually and universally–combine their work for the God of Society with hedonic pursuits made possible by the loot their political crimes have won them. Hollywood is filled with rich sybarites, who are mainly interested in the pleasure of consuming unearned moral virtue. They might well say “I may not BE a good person, but I PLAY one to perfection.”
To my mind, and I repeat ideas I think worth repeating, obviously, we need to get to the bottom SCIENTIFICALLY of what happens when we die. It is an empirical question, one with mountains of well gathered data already, and one ripe for an effort equal to that which put us on the moon. I would argue it is vastly more important.
And, again, the reason so many scientists, who should be passionately curious about all things which can be described in systems of measurement and observations of many sorts, reject such work is that THEIR religion, their escape from death through abstraction, requires NO CHANGES to the foundational catechism of materialistic absolutism, even if that creed is empirically weak and vulnerable to many good criticisms.
I read all this, and what I am seeking for myself is this: the spirit of play. Playing with ideas, playing in the barren wastelands, playing in howling winds, unafraid, curious, bold, moving.
I will quote a poem I like to quote from time to time in the next post.