Morning Musing: The collective social/cultural illusion: You have needs; but if you behave and conform to the collective illusion you can participate in the collective power of that illusion. You can then satisfy all your needs. Meanwhile, in order to increase its power over you, the collective increases your sense of need. It also tightens its demand for conformity. Thus, you can become all the more committed to the collective illusion in proportion to becoming more hopelessly mortgaged to collective power. How does this work? The collectivity informs and shapes your will to happiness (Are we having fun yet?) by presenting you with irresistible images of yourself as you would like to be (or should be according to the collective): having fun that is so perfectly credible that it allows no interference of conscious doubt. In theory such a good time can be so convincing that you are no longer aware of even a remote possibility that it might change into something less satisfying. In practice, expensive fun always admits to doubt, which blossoms out into another full-blown need, which then calls for a still more credible and more costly refinement of satisfaction, which again fails you. The end of the cycle is despair. Because we live in a womb of collective illusion, our freedom remains abortive. Our capacity for joy, peace, and truth are never liberated. They can never be used. We are prisoners of a process, a dialectic of false promises and real deceptions ending in futility. (Thomas Merton, Raids On The Unspeakable) I think Thomas description of the seduction of our lives by a host of thin things valued by what he calls the collective, in our pursuit of happiness is on point. We become protective of our illusion of value to the degree we participate in collective evil in order to preserve our way of life, all the time thinking of ourselves a righteous. We will stand by, cover our ears and close our eyes to all sorts of horrendous injustice and inequality. We will even demonize the poor, marginalized and disenfranchised to self-justify. We externalize our demons and refuse to take responsibility for our thoughts, emotions and actions. We convince ourselves that we are the victims when we cant get our way. We will even come to believe that we are being denied our religious freedoms if we cannot oppress and punish others for not complying to our theological preferences. We rationalize our position to the point that we become convinced that our way is the only way and that everyone else is wrong, or even worse, has a character and spiritual problem if they do not agree. In short, we become terribly and hurtfully confused in regards to our own identity and thus the value and significance of others around us. Everything becomes defined in terms of our bottom line. Why? Because we have let the cultural/social collective (religious and secular can hardly be distinguished) tell us who we are and the value of our lives. Thus, everything become dehumanized even as we raise out hands in worship to a god who wants to heal our lives and relationships. We would probably welcome that healing if it were not for all we have to give up which we presently cling too for the sake of happiness. So, in order to fix this disconnect we refashion god after our own image. We become committed to this self feeding system that end up creating a world of hurt. With everything being so convoluted, how in the world do we find ourselves out of the mess? Heck, we dont even recognize that we are a mess because is always the other guys fault. I would love to have your thoughts.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 13:51:23 +0000
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