Nothing can or should substitute for knowing our own minds. The historical toll of single-minded, authoritarian ideology is bringing us collectively to our knees, arguably. The historical toll of our codependent national ingroups bounded by the rationality of groupthink, and the mentality that the truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it. Bringing us to our knees.
The historical toll of our collectively paranoid mental cocoons, clique-slaves hiding from ourselves inside tribes of whatever arbitrary status enough people who share it want to believe makes them elect above all others.
I’ll say it again: bringing us to our knees.
Of our diminished status as slaves to groupthink, emotionally- and developmentally-stunted shadows of our own potential, unwilling or unable to rise above slavish, servile dependence on external approval in lieu of developing independent value systems as maturing individuals–even where this brings us into conflict with control freaks lurching into despotic overreach in a tacit admission of their own powerlessness to effect meaningful or effective remedy amidst crisis.
If you suggest examining root causes, you’re the problem. Bringing us to our knees.
Collective narcissists, drunk on the ritual, normalised conceit of collective paranoia, agreeing authoritarian codependence. Our wagons circled in defense of the crumbs from the table of oligarchic privilege afforded us by collusion with the rat race. God if I can’t have the rat race and consumerism in lieu of economic democracy and social autonomy, what would be the point of even living.
Bringing us to our knees.
Maybe it’s not entirely insane to imagine we might benefit from making a conscious point of defying groupthink and collective paranoia as a survival objective.
If that’s the case: hey, how about that Tao?
Did you know: Light and dark, good and evil, are two halves of a greater whole? Yuh, apparently so. Not just because someone said so either eh, and you just have to STFU and believe what you’re told because it’s in this insane brick because divine wisdom means not respecting an audience that also reckons it knows what’s good for you as a brick you don’t ever want to have to read. Which also gets more oppressive the more insane it sounds for some reason.
Anyway, like, take it or leave it: collective paranoia says the cosmos is split between good and evil, pick a side. Everyone except psychopaths and edgelords picks the side of good. Demagogues provide all the answers as to the nature of the other side, those heinous, evil outsiders, while possessing nary a clue as to the question. The underlying message: the cosmos is split. These frustrated used-car vendors or standover racket mobsters are minting witches for the big hunt and positing themselves the solution to the great Diabolical Conspiracy Against the World of Light.
The lie of collective paranoia, however, can never last long in any particular form: good and evil are both core elements of existence. We only deny this fact because we look to deny the Other in our own subjective conflicts and irresolution, because the kind of mud we throw is an implicit admission of what we hate and fear most about ourselves, because forming moral judgements is also the moment we throw off masks of civility and reveal a want of ethical or individual core behind them. Slaves to the bounded rationality of authoritarian groupthink and its collectively paranoid specters of evil are out of touch with ourselves and lashing out politically and militarily, but this is not a source of evil. It’s only terrorism when western imperialists don’t benefit from all the terrorism that’s happening.
Evil is everywhere. Good is everywhere. We project our imbalance onto the world in the name of the Good, and it resonates in an imbalanced world where imbalance is as normal as collective paranoia and servile groupthink. None of which is an Evil, but all of which is perpetrated in the name of the Good. Acting out and lashing out and doing all sorts of harm in the name of rising above violence might seem like harm but it’s actually Tough Love, apparently.
Historians Val Plumood and Norman Cohn have theorised along the lines Philip K. Dick wrote a bunch of stuff about, more or less to the effect of a paranoid streak in the collective unconscious–an evolutionary schism, in fact. Arthur Koestler and quite a bunch of others have written shit. Carl Sagan maybe; I don’t know, I have Dragons of Eden halfway read in a pile somewere. The triune brain theory was that the human brain is divided into 3 parts, in line with sort of evolving out of the animal kingdom. The bit at the back, amygdala or some shit, the reptile brain, and the limbic system in the middle, the emotional brain good for having pets.
As the story goes, the two were well-integrated over time. When the neocortex mammal brain came along, though, that involved a lot of rapid developments at once, and that part of the brain began to grow a lot faster. It was therefore less well-integrated with the other parts of the brain. If memory serves, Koestler’s commentary is along the lines of what should have been our greatest triumph has become our greatest tragedy instead, as our relatively poorly-developed mammalian brains tend to be dominated by the older parts of the brain associated with what are nominally rungs further back on the evolutionary ladder (there are no knuckle-draggers or troglodytes within single-minded cliques with decrepit higher faculties that struggle to deal with reality outside of turgid groupthink but, just ask them).
If any of that holds, is the Tao not so much a substitute for our own minds, but a light that shines on the collective unconscious? A light onto collective paranoia as the bars of the evolutionary cage, the source of the schizophrenic split in the historical collective unconscious? Might we make an exit from the feeble swamp by rising above false binaries between Self and Other, known and unknown, included and excluded, light and dark, good and evil? Instead of letting Evil be used to scare us, might we instead address our own fears and traumas, and how they leave us open to manipulation and further abuse?
Control belief systems tell us we’re weak, and sell us imperial protection rackets exploiting collective paranoia to drum up business with what H.L. Mencken called ‘an endless procession of imaginary hobgoblins.’ Anyone who can provoke us can control us. The big secret of thought control though is that the big knobs in power and authority need us, not the other way around. Do we really need their protection? Why? What if what we actually need is our own minds and imperial control freaks not trying to drive wedges between tribes to better control everyone?
What if it’s all about about transcending tribal mentalities, and the divide-and-conquer antics of big knobs in positions of power and authority trying to set the peasants against each other to better rule us? What if we need to be in touch with ourselves and each other more than we need to be obedient servants of prevailing social and economic hierarchies if we want to survive? What if it’s about knowing which questions to ask, rather than having all the right answers, because casuality lives in the grey area between the black and whites? Does being able to deal with grey area in between black-and-white absolutes matter to long-term survival?
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