The other day I was in a Half Price Books store, and looked at the wall of movies and music, and thought “that is a wall of sensations, of vicarious experiences”. That is what we buy, isn’t it? Experiences?
But following up on the point I made yesterday, it is SOMEONE ELSE’S experience. You are watching. They are doing. They are out there, and you are in there with them. Some part of you, I feel, never leaves.
This is habit forming. It is a way of interacting with the world that you don’t see, that is hidden. After all, you swerve to avoid obstacles in the road, laugh with your friends, smell the grass when you are mowing the lawn.
But something is missing. You are being carried. You are not taking turns in your interactions with the universe. In a room filled with light and life, you only see scenes from another room, far, far away.
Over the last day or so I’ve been swiveling around this seeming dichotomy of reason and emotion, of abstraction and concrete experience.
I have said from time to time that thoughts are machines. Reason is the systematic use of thought. It is, we might say, the MECHANICAL use of thought. It is the building of structures that in theory, in the abstract, in their ideal forms, DO NOT CHANGE. A squared plus B squared always equals C squared.
Plainly, reason machines are useful in building material things, objects for use, like tractors, and test tubes.
But reason cannot be made an end in itself. It is a transitional device, a bridge from an A worth visiting to a B worth visiting. Making it an end in itself is living on the bridge. You live nowhere. You are not alive to the real world. to the many forms of “weather” surrounding you.
The very first act of abstraction is to eliminate emotion. You must be clinical, detached. That’s fine, but then what? The process becomes habit. The emotional energy grows undetected. The disrupting passions erode sanity in the dark, unseen, because the perceptual filter of such people screens them out. They are in their self estimation dispassionate, scientific, objective, and in reality horror stricken by the core lack of meaning in their lives, which they feel to the extent they put all their eggs in the basket of reason.
We can talk to the universe, and it answers. That is where God is. God is not an abstraction, or a logical puzzle, but a reality that is ONLY open to those who can process the world as other than detached observers.
Life interacts with life. Machines do not interact with anything. They are built for a purpose, exist for a purpose, and are not open to influence, only reconstruction by another agency.
Socialism is the logical end of logic. It is society as machine, with all the gears well manufactured to fit with all the other gears. It is abstraction brought into reality, dispassion expressed through an explosion of rage masquerading as something else.