The Perpetual “ ‘In Life’ Politburo” (3)
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I sat up and listened, took note, and pulled the siggee at the foot of the video back 3 x (to 4:27) to hear the former Reagan administration budget director David Stockman say: “[The Fed is] the Monetary Politburo of the Western World” http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-04-13/entire-economy-ponzi-scheme . Unfortunately, the phrase was soon edited out. Still, the censors kept in enough phrases to make it worth listening to, such as “This [the budget] is a Giant Ponzi Scheme (of the Federal Reserve)….(at 2:27)”, and “the Fed is injecting the heroin….” (at 4:37) , and….
So, who am I to say that the Western scheme (they call it ‘civilization’) is imploding and the sound of a major ‘thud’ is but moments away, when I really think that the scheme is imploding; yet, in spite of what I think, I am not sure that I think so?
“Ah…”, you may reply, “I understand your gobbledygook, because, look! …how normal everything appears. Not a leaf or blade of grass is stirring. The air smells as fresh as if a cloud of O3 just went by.”
I, too, understand what you mean. I am, afterall, conversing with myself. Indeed, ‘normality’ reminds me of a German folksong my nanny taught me when I was a small boy, had hurt myself, and was crying.
The nanny sang: “Kommt ein Vogel geflogen, setzt Sich nieder auf mein Fuss, hat ein Zetterl im Schnabel von der Mutter ein Gruss!” http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kommt_ein_Vogel_geflogen (A little bird comes flying and alights on my foot; it has a letter in its beak with greetings from mother.)
After the song, I had a few hiccups and ran on. I knew that by Friday father would be home with a pay check, and he would take me to the toy store and buy me the ball that I had seen in the window when passing by.
Today, however, I hear behind me the footsteps of the Bilderberg Group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Group , and see them carrying sacks filled with trillions of dollars in off shore money. If the sacks contain money worth real assets, the Bilderbergs will not catch up with me. However, because the trillions are in fiat currency, and within the next few steps is likely to go “Poof!”, they are likely to overtake me.
Since in my youth I lived for a time on a farm, and got to like the idea of being able to harvest my own potatoes, in my fantasy, I was always able to escape the Bilderbergs and run for my potato patch, where the stems and leaves of the plants were thick enough to cover and hide me if I lay between the furrows. However, with the trillions of the Bilderberg money turning into thin air, they may overtake me yet and rush by me with a funerary dirge on their lips.
I am saved from a premature death by the insights of my favourite on-the- cusp-of-centuries philosopher, Slavoy Žižek. Well grounded in the history of philosophy and an enviable memory, Žižek writes of the profound humiliation suffered by post-enlightenment humankind when it was overtaken and humiliated by the cognitive sciences http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cognitive%20science . Explains Žižek: “Strictly correlative to the humiliation of ‘man’ is the exponential growth of humankind’s technological domination over nature in modernity.”
What Žižek means by ‘humiliation’ is the discovery that the human mind and body conforms to the rules of technology (the body performs much like a machine and thinks much like a digital computer) and we cannot escape as in former days into believing ourselves to be supernatural beings, say, an icon on the walls of a countryside basilica; or as W.B. Yeats said it in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium” http://www.online-literature.com/frost/781/ : “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing, / But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling….” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP9FGGMZpYM
To be ‘in nature’ or ‘out of nature’ is such a common experience in our time that our world comes bifurcated, and it does not appear that we know how to bring the two forks of the one road together again.
Those of us who feel particularly ‘humiliated’ have attached ourselves to the ‘in nature’ or cognitive sciences (led by the Word) as the way of escaping shame and recovering our pride. It is this element of the psyche, which beginning with the steam engine created industrial society and all that comes with it. This development was natural, once the ‘out of nature’ psyche (the irretrievable Act) was not only repressed and humiliated in turn, but was, in fact, ‘successfully’ killed. The ‘success’ of the murder is, however, based on the presumption that being ‘in nature’ means life in nature only—as if only the self-consciousness of the living (in leadership circles) matters. This exclusivity of life ‘in life’ enabled Stalin and Hitler to kill without guilt all those who were of ‘in life’, and were deemed harmful by them. They kept alive only those creatures, which they held necessary as servants.
The iconic God of ‘in life’ leadership and humankind is perfectly illustrated by Stanley Kubric’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick movie “2001 Space Odyssey” (1968) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML1OZCHixR0 .
Today’s leaders (Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, Nixon, Bush, Obama, Putin, etc.) are very much in the image of the ape smashing the dried bones and skull of a hippopotamus, the latter standing for that part of humankind which may not be of one mind with its gone ape leadership.
The humans living ‘in life’ claim that the ‘out of life’ God does not exist, even while ‘in life’ philosophers continue to distinguish between an ‘in life’ Real and an ‘out of life’ Another. The difficulty that blocks the road http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y64/Hands123/deadendtrackedit.jpg to the rejoining of thought apparently is Death.
Nevertheless, if we can prove for ourselves that there are two realities, an inner and outer, an ‘in’ and an ‘out’, and both are real enough ‘singularities’, then why not an ‘out of life (and body)’ experience for an ‘out of body’ reality, i.e., ? What if phenomenology as fuel for life is only an ‘in life’ phenomenon, but that the ‘out of life’ fuel for life is Mind? Are not atomic and subatomic particles clear evidence that construction of reality continues after death—which is why reality may not yet be fully constructed?
If there is any truth to the above, it remains an open question whether the bifurcation caused by our ‘humiliation’ holds for all time? At this moment in time however most of those with a ‘higher education’ appear to consider the question as closed and react to their own positivist answer in a sadistic-masochistic manner that causes incalculable harm to nature and the rest of humankind.
To an outside (of ‘in’) observer fantasizing him- or her-self to be less compulsively motivated than Žižek’s ‘man’, the ‘humiliated one’ is charging towards “autistic masturbatory ‘asocial’ joisance”*. The freshmen college anecdote about the monkey pushing the button that causes him an orgasm until he dies from too many convulsions are a social reality, except that for the monkey’s hand levered button, we push the lever just thinking about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxHxXQPxBTQ .
At the point (in a hypothetical time) where Žižek’s post-modern hyper-man meets with our Great Ancestor (still practicing subsistence economy), there may occur an interesting confrontation.
Our ‘out of nature’ ancestors raise a question which the ‘humiliated’ one may consider yet another humiliation. The question is: “Why are you jerking off so much?”
To which the ‘in nature’ response may go: “Why are you so slow, so unmotivated, and so backward?”
To which the reindeer herders, the Avenks, the travelling Johns reply: “What we took ten billion years to create (yes, we continue to create even when we are so-called dead), you want to do in two centuries. All the living creatures which co-evolved with us, you turn into bones in two decades.”
“Yes, but we can renew our body parts and clone ourselves to live in perpetuity.”
“True, but you have turned our community festivals into Fuck Carnivals, and all the wild animals in the wood are dead because your hunters get an orgasm from each kill.”
*Slavoy Žižek, “The Universal Conception”, Continuum, pp. 308.
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