I wrote most of this a while back for the 'Thinking and Feeling' thread.
Mechanics of Power
Early rulers found it useful to declare themselves as being God. This pretence has never really been given up, even if it’s newer and cleverer iterations passes over the head of modern man and his culture. As the absurdity of a man declaring himself as being God became more apparent, new ploys were needed to program the unconscious layer of our psyches to see ‘divinity’ as being generated outside of and at a distance from the humble citizen.
Perhaps unintentionally, early rulers learned the value of imposing a double bind on their subjects. By making it very painful to create a conscious model that may be at odds with societal and unconscious programming, most people will instead find conscious ways of validating their underlying drivers or unconscious programming. The happy consequence of this for the ruler is that the subjects will generally access their sub-conscious store of knowledge only to buttress their conscious modeling, in preference to tapping this store to challenge or redevelop our unconscious modeling. The double bind forces one to accept absurdities in exchange for belonging to the group. This situation results in fractured beings where the layers of psyche ‘fight’ with each other, rather than supporting and integrating. The flowering of ‘divinity’ is the product of integration of the (three) layers of psyche and is the greatest fear of controllers.
One might see Christianity as a Roman psyop because it did fulfill several key interests of power. (Someone realized that) Wisdom might be controlled and contained by associating it with one special representative, rather than to let it be seen as a natural result of any searching consciousness. So the wise guys were hired to compose a more universal description about our relationship with the divine. Or so they may have thought. The real deals happen in the editing room where the mere addition of the (effective) clause that to be a ‘Christian’ one must accept that ‘Jesus’ is God in the form of an individual historical man. This fable would have ‘divinity’ to be a rare thing indeed, certainly not something to be easily contained by the average person. The wise guys were left to walk the lost highways while the administrators found a fine new tool to keep their charges compliant.
What’s a poor boy to do? If you wanna be ‘good’ ya gotta be ‘Christian’, which happens to require the occasional pillaging or burning of the neighbors over odd pretences. Odd that, but hey it’s part of a larger package. Intellectuals of the day could only speak within a framework that cultivated reference and deference to dogma, and essentially rule by clergy and Papal authority. It was the only game in town for a long long time and modern folk do themselves a disservice by ignoring the pervasiveness and depth of this programming of our unconscious layer of psyche.
Our situation is such that the narratives that drive our psyches are still a totally top down affair. The uber-narrative of a restricted space for the expression of ‘divinity’ (or intellectual acuity, for you secular types) promotes pride, pompousness and a general lack of respect towards ones fellow man.
The endurance of this effective vertical authority distribution system directly correlates to our use and participation with its tools and benefits. Poor, try again. Because our narratives are built on fantasies, even well meaning folk are caught up into a system of institutionalized lying.
But human relations need not always be in terms of the dominant narratives. One does not need to know another’s creed or politics to be kind towards them. Real culture can come from the grass roots if we learn to assert it by cultivating better relations with real people.
The ‘culture’ that Brussels presumes to impose on us seems like a revival of the Roman Empire and a hard reassertion of the vertical authority distribution system. We the people can just shut the fuck up as far as they are concerned.
Thankfully, as the internal contradictions of this coercive agenda unfold, even the average man may have the light bulb turn on where he realizes that most of what he ‘believes’ was pressed onto him by manipulative liars.
(Because there will be no peer reviewed papers on the subject, intellectuals will be the last to recognize the new reality.)
I live with the good fortune of being surrounded by kind people.
While I might not be so kind, whether by habit or nature, I don’t know; still because of an intellectual commitment to finding value in the process of becoming, I tend to embrace my experience. Which of course is a funny feeling during times of great pain. This embrace tends to encourage me to do things that make other people happy. For my work context this means getting a lot of work DONE while maintaining a high level of detail. I do this fairly well because I have ‘systems’ and maintain focus on each task as it presents itself to me. This embrace or respect for experience, if you will, also helps preserve my tools and vehicle. My corn bristle broom is over five years old and still looks almost new at the business end.
For the home and social context it means trying to listen, open and respectfully to the verbal and emotional cues that are attempting to express deeper concerns. Being kind need not be all about altruism. It can be quite self-serving in that kindness is often multiplied in its return. It has certainly served me well. One thing I have found to not mix well with kindness is lying. It is not kind to lie. It is disrespectful, a marker for manipulation and certain to eventually destroy the trust required for any two people to have a healthy relationship. Institutionalize the lie and multiply by several billion, then naturally we get the potential shitstorm that ‘civilization’ seems ready to drop on our doorstep.
People who are kind tend to not use their intellects in the service of coercion and domination. These folk are natural expositors of horizontal authority distribution systems because they respect the input and contributions of others. While these folk may flourish in the outlier regions of our culture, the material rewards seem reserved for those of a domineering, manipulative and aggressive style of mentality. The empire will only end when this style of mentality is no longer endorsed by the pretensions within our thinking.
These pretensions may fade as we realize that ‘divinity’ is the birthright of all people and is more often ‘driven away’ rather than embraced by the ‘special’ people making the effective claim of being proper vehicles for ‘divinity’.
Happy Holidays and best wishes to all
