Make sense?
A person is unconscious and dreaming. The dream so vivid that it can be taken for real. Virtual reality – a hallucination where they’re seeing things. So, it might just as well be real if the idea is to make them aware that it’s not. They won’t believe you. I wouldn’t. They’re intractable. Hearing that it’s all a hallucination would be irritating. But if the dream is a nightmare, its characters brutal and self-destructive, shouldn’t something be done? Ring a bell? Open the window blinds? Yell at them or shake them to end the suffering?
We’d have to be one of the characters in the dream to know the extent of it, but we’re not. We’re another Person with another perspective. Put in this position by the way we’re related to the dreamer. Family. Shared responsibility for being there for one another. Motivated by Love as strong as that between Parent and Child, between best friend and best friend, soulmate and soulmate. Connected to another Life and the life they’re living as though living it ourselves, enabled and empowered by intuition and empathy.
If we were one of the characters we would know the extent of the suffering and we would want to remove the cause of it. Form a delegation to speak for everyone and tell the dream’s ‘creator’ enough is enough. The hallucination has its points but something is radically wrong. It’s not working. If a better one isn’t possible then how about putting everything on hold until a better idea comes along. That does work.
Make sense? Human-animal history from day one has been one ‘god-worshiping’ religion after another, one utopian scheme after another, one mass-movement ideology after another. All hoping to turn life on Earth into a paradise of everyone being rational and getting along. Like we’re not a sub-species of ape, tribal and Machiavellian when all that matters is being king of the hill. Forced conformance with the king’s rule from cradle to grave. The totalitarian ‘ideal’ that arrogates every prerogative and every power to the voice atop hierarchy. Do as I say or else. Comparative and competitive. As corrupt, irrational, and unworkable as the behavior it presumes to correct. Self-defeating self-destruction. Tribal.
It can’t make sense so long as human-animal’s knee-jerk reaction to pushback is to go tribal. To hunker down into tribes already there or to form new ones. When, yeah, that works if all that’s called for is to make the global supply chain put something new on the grocery store shelf. But when what’s ‘needed’ is to crush universal human rights under the heel of regimentation or to obliterate opposing tribes, where does that get us?
Communist!
We draw strength and encouragement from ‘togetherness’ and ‘unity’ when all it means is we’re talking to one another. Trying repeatedly to persuade ‘others’ to do the right thing when everybody’s ‘right thing’ is different. Wholly owned and operated by their perspective and impervious to tampering. As incapable of being melded into one universal ‘right thing’ as it would be to meld embodiments into one big body, personifications of different ideas into one big idea. As if the myth that sustains the tribal ‘ideal’ were real: that its members are all the same because they wear the same uniform. With the same style, colors, and insignia distinguished by numbers and rank. But for all the world as uniform by nature as by appearances.
An ‘ideal’ that’s not limited to any one tribe because it’s a pathogen not an ideal. Residing in the human-animal Psyche. The mediator among all influences that determine identity. The Self that we are and how we behave. Drawing strength and encouragement from tribal togetherness is entrusting the care of the chicken to the fox. If the chicken is the worse for wear what did we expect?
Body idolatry combined with tribal idolatry makes for a formidable opponent. Red army ants blitzing their way across Europe, terror-bombing England into submission. But even with an evil genius at the controls it didn’t work. England didn’t submit; Europe and its allies pushed back; and the predator was crushed. All of it a grand display of technological fervor, that in better times pampers bodies instead of crushing them. Extends life instead of shortening it. Manipulated by the predatory instincts of human-animal beasts who care nothing for ‘progress’. Who’d rather regress to a mythical state where beast is king. To the mother of all utopian schemes: make-believe.
Why make-believe? Because it requires nothing of Mind. Nothing of differentiation or empathy to put it ‘there’. The faculties of Mind that distinguish human-ape from ape. The accreditation of Sapiens as an institution qualified to manage a planet of the apes. To serve as a role model for all the other animals entrusted to its care, endowed as it is with wisdom and compassion. Because all that make-believe requires is an act of will. That any mindless beast can perform, freeing it from every obligation of existence in a world that’s shared. Connected, instead of an airlock hermetically sealed against connection.
Drawing strength and encouragement from tribal togetherness brought us National Socialism. A perversion of Deutschland uber alles that perversely inspired millions to strive toward something better while perpetrating something worse. It gave us Communism, a perversion of human-animal economy that did the same. Both for violating the integrity of Person. For imagining history as a grand sweep of animals as well as events. ‘Flocks’ herded along by the machinations of abstractions, caught between the sincere and the sinister. Aryan supremacy contending with subhumans, working class victimhood exploited by arrogance – mean-spirited self-interest. If either ‘movement’ had devoted as much time to understanding Person as it did to weaponizing its wounded Psyche civilization would have been spared its worst calamities.
The psychology of a beast: wild and willful, that can’t tolerate limits. After the Great Depression economists theorized about limiting free market capitalism. Maynard Keynes among them, whose intellectual allies were welcomed by Harvard’s economics department. A time of experimentation when academics and politicians worked together to fix what was obviously broken. Yet to business owners and employers like my Dad there was no excuse for it. For meddling in their affairs. Having the effrontery to put limits on whatever they chose to do with ownership. Putting me in the crosshairs of his withering judgment. His son, because I went to Harvard. I was one of ‘them’. A ‘communist’.
Herd with no mentality
All part of a much larger problem. Intolerance of limits not only on Definition and Conscience but on situation. The antithesis of omnipotence. The fatuous idea that what was there at the beginning before Movement was static-state no-movement. Where all the elements of a ‘big picture’ were assembled in one ‘place’. Boundaryless no-movement or else there would have to be something ‘knowable’ beyond its limits and subject to change. Not ‘place’ at all if it had no definition. One big answer: mortal enemy of situation and the perspective needed to define it. ‘Knowable’ only by its know-it-all ‘creator,’ a make-believer whose worst fear would be questioning. The threat of captivity to limits — to its contradiction and replacement by situation and perspective.
Fatuous because what was there at the beginning was situation, not its reverse-reflection opposite. Harmful because its premise is among the insanities that ushered our unformed metaphysical Self into hallucination. Attached to human-animal’s Psyche where it can block perspective from doing its job. Sizing up situations by recognizing their limits.
As had to be done by Movement at the beginning when it occurred within the limits of its situation. Not preceded by a boundaryless-limitless know-it-all big answer – the antithesis of movement — but brought about symbiotically. When a number of conditions coalesced to make ignition happen. Their theoretical antecedent another premise that couldn’t happen, only this one made sense. That only needed Movement to bring it into Creation where it left a permanent imprint. A visual of the structure of Creation: fraction encased within triangle. Right-side up in Reality, upside-down in hallucination. ‘Life’ on Earth, our cloud cuckoo-land where anything goes.
These thoughts but an exercise in applying perspective to size up a situation. The human condition. A performance that can’t be repeated if thoughts are captive to make-believe. Antithetic to limits rather than sympathetic, and so incapable of definition. Of the most basic requirement of navigation: figuring out what’s going on. Oblivious. Dependent on observation of what “everyone else is doing.” Taking care to fit in. To become proficient at manipulating appearances lest it be obvious that the captive to make-believe has no idea what it’s doing. The ultimate casualty of herd mentality: herd with no mentality. Person without a Psyche able to orient and guide it. A stick-in-the-mud. Life without a story. Pathetic, and all because make-believe can’t tolerate limits. Can’t understand the way things are — situation.
Fantasies of ‘forgiveness’
So, what’s to be done? Is there a better approach? How about reinventing ourselves as Persons instead of animals? As individuals who need their tribes, of course, to load up their grocery carts with goodies but also need something more. Character that doesn’t depend on games and uniforms for its integrity. Combat and bloodletting for discipline and resolve. A no-man’s-land of senseless, nihilistic destruction to band into brothers.
Then what? How about relating to the source of the hallucination? Not its ‘manipulator-god’ but to the Mind that’s lost in self-unawareness. Out of its right mind and delusional. Self-manipulated when there’s no ‘god’ to manipulate it, only itself and the reverse-reflection that accompanies everything.
The part of Definition without definition: function that can’t be recognized without recognizing what it isn’t. Its contradiction. Possibility accompanied everywhere by the implication of impossibility. Real that can’t be Real without the implication of unreal. Questioning that can’t stand up for the Integrity of Character and Family, the freedom of Choice or the Worth of Life-Creation, without the implication of dividing. A constant source of agitation behind Movement, evolution, and progress. The slave reminding Caesar of his mortality while his triumphs soar into immortality. As essential to the Character of Self-Awareness as the Energy that lights it. Self-questioning.
How about relating to the source of the hallucination by talking to it? Engaging with it as though with an unconscious Person who can still hear even though their eyes are shut. Even though their Mind is cluttered with the commotion of a hallucination.
Engage with it in the role of Guidance. Because if we’re going to represent a mirror asking Who are you? that’s who we’ll be. Guidance redirected away from the stage where playactors pretend to the author of pretense. To the source of their debasement and humiliation. Animals herded this way and that by their manipulator. A deluded playwright whose ‘guidance’ is an agent of the author’s own invention: the ‘creative spirit’ of a costume designer and coach for variety of poses, but never actually doing anything. In the land of make-believe where everything appears to happen but nothing ever does. A dead end of wasted Energy.
Despite all the distractions of the dream the figure lying on its metaphorical back is Mind. Its vision absorbed by imaginings. Its eyes closed, but there’s hope that the same isn’t true of its metaphorical ears. Science says comatose persons in a vegetative state can still hear. Can still process information, and if this applies to the Mind hallucinating ‘life’ on Earth then what’s to stop any one of us, its dream-world personifications, from addressing it instead of wasting time and Energy on one another? Instead of venting our frustrations on one another and indulging in fantasies of ‘forgiveness’ that do more to let victims off the hook than perpetrators.
A call for usefulness
Up goes the roar from within make-believe’s house of cards. Squeals of protest from the three pigs who’ve staked their lives and fortunes on appearances. Terrified that the power they’ve arrogated and the wealth they’ve hogged will be blown away by the wind. Like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, when the big bad wolf huffs and puffs and blows make-believe down. Their house of cards built over generations by the lies and hypocrisies of self-serving self-regard. Authoritarians of every stripe, seeking surcease from the limits of hierarchy by rising to the top. Both ends of the political spectrum, left as well as right. Religions and the atmospherics of tradition. Self-appointed ‘realists’ all.
All fashioned in the image of make-believe. The reverse of the way things are. An inversion of its structure, with wildness and willfulness — a herd of beasts — defining and dividing from the top. A perversion of its integrity, with every part a mockery of its function. The whole contraption a joke. Funny but sick. Entertaining if you’re the joker, a catastrophe for everyone else. What is it then but a test of Character? A call for usefulness. For making ourselves useful to the dreamer instead of useless to ourselves. By talking to it. Relating to it. Helping it get it right by asking the one question that make-believe can never ask: Who are you?