I wrote symbolic actions create symbolic results. But how does the symbolic result manifest? In superficial emotion, aka sentimentality.
Therefore symbolic actions work to create sentimental emotions. If the desired result is emotion, then this is a logical process. The action yields, reliably, the intended result.
What this process is NOT, however, is useful. It is solipsistic.
You know what? I’m going to leave you to draw the obvious conclusions.
I will simply add a further comment that in the same sense abstraction for the sake of abstraction betrays deep unwanted and ugly emotions, that sentimentality pursued for the sake of sentimentality reliably implies disordered, fantastical, virtual schizophrenic (in the proper use of the word) thinking.
If you feel clearly, you think clearly. If I have an advantage as a thinker–over and above the pugnaciousness that allows me to easily think and express forbidden and (I hope) original thoughts–it is that I work daily to examine and process my deep emotions, my shadow, and work daily to understand the architecture and structure of the subterranean worlds which all of us have, and which affect everything we do every day.
To put it mildly, most academics, politicians, and self described intellectuals don’t do this, not really. They run everything through a filter, through what I have called a Tubaform, of one sort or another. They never get to primary experience. That requires a tool, like effective, intelligent meditation, practiced often.
It occurs to me that sentimentality might be defined as “the drive to indulge regularly in derivative emotional cliches.”
And you know, it’s not MY world–not the white male world–that is being destroyed. It is the worlds of black men and women and boys and girls too. And those of Asian Americans and Latinos and Native Americans and everyone else. It’s all on the chopping block. There is no mercy in this crowd, no decency, no restraint. It’s all about death and fire, in the end, the thin patina of self righteous rhetoric notwithstanding. History is clear on this. These psychiatric maladies have expressed themselves countless times in human history, beginning long before the invention of the first alphabet.