THE ANAMORPHIC LENS

I watched a classic film the other day: The Oxford Murders (2008), based on the 2003 book written by Argentine mathematician Guillermo Martinez. The subplot was the clash between genius minds, one a physics major claiming that “If we manage to discover the secret meaning of numbers, we will know the secret meaning of reality” – and a Lichtenstein-ian professor who said the only absolute truth is that “everything is fake.”

The student is psyched about proving his theory, while the professor insists, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” From there a “who dunnit” murder mystery ensues. These two characters could have been photo-shopped over the faces of Aristotle and Plato in Raphael’s The School of Athens.

I have to confess a personal bias in watching this film. Age proves itself over youthful exuberance, even before the film finishes its first scene. I go with Lichtenstein (and Heisenberg, also mentioned) every time over hard science. What all those brilliant mathematicians and physicists do is to always begin with an absolute they assume to be indisputable and inviolate – as in 2+2=4. From there they claim to uncover the mysteries of the universe.

But the biggest distinction between the “uncertainty” philosophers and math wizards is that uncertainty needs no defense. The wizard’s argument does. The latter is in constant pursuit of an answer which can be empirically stated. He’ll never find it. Because his first mistake, his first chess move, is to move forward. He doesn’t look back to question that which invents the absolutist principle in the first place. There’s nothing absolute about “the source” from which it comes.

It’s the old split between Eastern and Western philosophy, and for some reason the West refuses to surrender its ego/geocentricism in matters of cosmic meaning. And here we are – living lives, running governments, nations, religions, and societies based on rules we know (at some level) to be absolutely “conditional.” Paul Tillich could have been the Oxford student’s father, a mathematician pledged to his search for absolutes – only to come away years later with a conclusion of “relative absolutism.” The only real absolute is that everything is relative. The oxymoron would be comic if it weren’t so serious.

And serious, it is. The cosmic conspiracy is, we might say, the reverse of the “Aquarian Conspiracy” theory coined by Marilyn Ferguson back in 1980. She at least pointed to the “conspiracy” of leading us out of our geocentric thinking. It resists the other conspiracy of keeping us trapped in a solipsistic orbit, thinking we’re being objective and unattached to the “self.” It’s kinda like rowing a boat beached on land. No one looks down to see that we’re beached, and we think we’re moving forward.

Just to exhaust that metaphor, if land is the fallacy of moving forward, then water is the reality of drowning into deeper fathoms, of sinking backwards. It’s giving up the ship, the final breath of life as we’ve known it. Which also means surrendering our foundations of reality. It’s changing the entire human focus.

What was in focus previously is now out of focus, and visa versa. Outlines are inlines, figure is ground, and “viewpoints” are the camera obscura (upside down). But it’s more than that. It’s no longer “either/or. It’s both – because there is no more center. I think of the words of St. Bonaventure: “God is that presence whose circumference is everywhere and center is nowhere.” This isn’t to invoke the subject of God. But the forfeiture of “self” has no choice but to cross into the subject of spirituality. Science and the “uncertainty” philosophers all dance on the perimeter of “G-D.”

A clearly pathological view entails seeing things out of focus, which we call “in focus.” It’s putting on very thick prescription glasses to see what’s out there. If someone decides to take them off, he’s struck with “diagnoses” and “symptoms” needing corrective action.

With creative types, there is an uncanny tolerance for ambiguity, for the rests between the sounds, voids between the plenum. There’s also an interest in “unrelated” fields, in novel combinations, images, and symbols. For every problem solved they end up with three more problems, more questions than answers.

Creative types also fit a somewhat predictable profile. A study in 1904 (by Havelock Ellis) noted that most came from fathers older than 30, mothers younger than 25, were sickly, introverted, uncomfortable churchgoers, and celibate (Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, to name a few). But that was 1904, and we’re careful today not to get stuck in typologies.

The question for today is one of matching creativity with an anamorphic lens, or intentional distortion. Creative types doff the thick glasses and see what isn’t supposed to be seen. Cogito (“I think”) originally meant “shake together,” while intelligo (“intelligence”) meant “select among.” The truly creative select differently.

A writer once said, “I write to find out what I’m thinking.” He found that writing had a “powdery quality to it, a light… shining through the haze and heat.” He “collected words that suddenly seemed to have new meaning… in contexts I have never thought before.” Creativity is the ability to make juxtapositions that elude us most of the time. It’s about connecting the unconnected. A chemistry Nobel Prize winner, Roald Hoffmann, said, “The imaginative faculties are set in motion by mental metaphor. Metaphor shifts the discourse… with a vengeance.”

Inspiration, said writer Sharon Begley, “does not lounge under apple trees waiting for fruit to fall or lightning to strike.” When it did not come for Freud, he said “I go halfway to meet it.” It means that creativity goes in any direction it desires. We have no control over it. And from any one fixed perspective, it can produce just as much “bad” work as “good.” But again, the lesson is about the detachment from all perspectives. I often think of the books I hated ten years ago for failing to inspire, only to magically come alive today. The book hasn’t changed, my perspective has. It’s as if it was patiently waiting for me to come around.

Einstein also made an interesting observation, saying that his own “intellectual development was retarded,” until he started thinking like a child again, especially about space and time. He made creativity bond with “expertise” – the child with the old man. The child’s mind is uncluttered by the intentional distortions (anamorphisms) of cognitive learning.

Logic and reason get twisted. “Seeing more” is counter-intuitive to our social needs. One’s curse is, as Howard Garner put it, having a “temperament that seeks arousal.” Biologically, it’s having too many “helper cells” that speed neural communication. Whatever the reasons for it, the problem isn’t with the person but society, as it gets more and more specialized, categorized, and narrow in its tolerance for “odd” juxtapositions. Those who have no choice in what they see find themselves as members of a “freak show.” As one young prodigy of the violin said, “While dazzling technique may carry a youthful career, it cannot support an adult one.” Being a “freak” is tempered with being young and “dazzling.” But then we grow up and enter the human fray.

The tragedy is spelled out in the case of the “loner” grade schooler who didn’t play with the other kids. She stayed inside and drew pictures of rabbits. She spoke only Spanish and kept average grades. Then she took a test, and a Spanish-speaking psychologist said she had an IQ of 175. No one is more lost and alone than that.

What actually distinguishes a creative type (or genius) from someone who is simply “schizophrenic” is the fortunate ability to translate one’s thoughts into a language everyone can relate to and understand (music, painting, dance, science, literature). It challenges and inspires. Minus that facility, one is basically doomed to the custody of psychiatrists and hospitals. — What’s interesting here is the fact that the term schizophrenia means “split-minded.” In recent years researchers have had to concede that the mentally “insane” aren’t split from anything, but just the reverse. They’re actually connected to something with which we are not. The “normal” mind maintains itself by staying safely extricated from dimensions of consciousness which obstruct socially-approved thoughts and behaviors. In other words, it is we who are “split-off.”

The mental diagnosis thus becomes the good metaphor for the distortion that “treats and corrects” what isn’t distorted. We had better don the prescription glasses, or else we end up alone drawing pictures of rabbits. It’s okay to doff the glasses for brief moments (or privately), but then we’d better cover up again and/or bring what we know into a (safely) recognizable language for others, as Einstein did. – It was said that Einstein would “leave his mind” to ask questions (like a child free of the debris of age). Somewhere he knew that in creating the question automatically created the answer. He could then consciously meet where that convergence happened. He could then bring it down and transform it into an equation.

The same experience happens to creative song-writers. When John Lennon and Bob Dylan were asked where their songs came from, they both responded “I don’t know.” It just channeled through them, they said. They essentially did the same thing Einstein did. They opened up and became conduits, transmitters, which turned into lyrics. Unfortunately for Dylan, his channel abruptly closed in the late 1960s. He didn’t do it. It closed by itself. And when asked if he could ever write like that again, he said, “no way.” His lens locked back into its distorted position, and he knew it.

For those creative types not gifted enough to translate what they see or know into a safe language, there are only the words (again) left by the professor as a warning: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” There’s nothing left to do except to know what one knows – and to draw rabbits.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM

Animals are our temperature gauge, barometer, and anemometer. They’re the first to let us know when storms are coming, storms “out there,” and storms “in here” (internal). It’s just another proof that we humans are not just connected to them through our DNA but also newly distanced from them. They live and breathe, as it were, right under the skin. It’s also why we often stand spellbound when watching them. We see ourselves, but we can’t quite comprehend it. And when we do, we dismiss it.

Which is just another reason we need to see ourselves once again. Animals high on the food chain are trying to tell us something. Take African elephants for example. In the last 25 years they’ve been accosting rhinos, attacking people and tourist buses, attacking each other, stampeding crops, abusing their own young and even rejecting them. Orphans are being found alone not just because of poaching but because mothers push them away. These highly intelligent, sensitive giants are literally “losing it.”

Cause: Overwhelming, unrelenting trauma – from poaching, development, loss of habitat, and being squeezed into smaller and smaller pockets of land with less and less food and water. Their traditional migration routes (hundreds, if not thousands of years old) have been disrupted and fenced off. There have been profound and irreversible changes to everything they know about their world. Elephants aren’t being elephants anymore, and they’re going insane.

Forget about the circus elephants who have already gone insane, unable to stand human abuse, shackles, cattle prods, and relentless isolation, going on rampages and forcing authorities to shoot them. – These are elephants in their natural habitats.

In Africa today, down is up, and up is down. From the elephant’s standpoint, everything is wrong. They’ve lost themselves, their very grounding and orientation. And it isn’t something nature has done, but what we’ve done to nature. It’s a wake-up call, a message from nature to us.

What elephants do not have is a mechanism that tells them to deny and delay their insanity. They express exactly what they experience, without hesitation or self-consciousness. The message to us is therefore twofold: first, that their bipedal cousins are heading in the same direction; and second, that the only thing holding them (us) back from doing the same behaviors are artificial barriers concocted by our wondrous minds. On the other hand, we already accost, abuse, and reject while telling ourselves that everything is normal, and even healthy. Elephants never lie.

This is quite stunning, actually. We’re copying everything the elephants are doing, in every way. The only difference is that we do it more violently and across the board in every sense imaginable. We seem to be caught in a world of oppositions: We simply cannot understand peace without violence next to it. The former doesn’t feel real unless the latter exists somewhere. We’ve locked ourselves into this axiomatic rule. Whereas elephants simply enjoy peace when peace exists. They are thoroughly immersed in it. They are aware of danger and violence, but they don’t measure the one by means of the other. There is no self-consciousness, doubt, ambivalence, or hesitation.

Awareness comes from the Latin geware (“to sense danger”). It’s where we get the derivative terms “beware” and “wary.” It has nothing to do with consciousness, which simply means “to know with.” And yet, strangely enough, we often join the two together and talk about “consciousness awareness.” It’s “apples & oranges” and makes so sense. It’s enough knowing that animals have awareness but not consciousness, and awareness is what joins humans to animals. We all sense danger. But again, how the two handle it is very different.

Humans negotiate with danger, make deals with it, anesthetize it when it gets too unbearable – all to avoid it. We prefer running instead of facing it. Animals run as well, but they keep it in perspective. Humans do not. For us, danger begins to loom larger in our minds. It then becomes a neurosis, and we end up with symptoms chasing and avoiding others symptoms, phantoms chasing phantoms. The mind is the “master of deception” and will destroy us if we don’t keep a handle on reality. Animals need not worry about reality.

What we do with the elephants therefore isn’t surprising either. Instead of seeing their behavior as a red flag to ourselves, we “band-aid” their symptoms by means of forced interventions. It’s a Catch-22 in the sense of having caused their problems in the first place, therefore needing to rely on desperate measures to repair them. “Fixing” means relocation programs, changing migration routes, pairing males and females in artificial environments, and (worst of all) shooting them when it’s no longer “economically feasible” to keep them alive or because they break through another fence. All of which just adds to the stressors they already face. They’re asking, “What are you doing to us?!”

Watching elephants act unnaturally within their own family systems is another red flag. These animals live in extended families which remain intact for generations. Aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, stay together just like humans to care and protect one another. When one dies, the grief is overwhelming. It is also expressed almost “ceremoniously.” That is, bereavement is carried out in ritual form. They file past the dead, stay for long periods, revisit the corpse, cry loudly and in silence, comfort one another, share the death experience gently with their young, and so on. The experience is devastating. But then they re-evaluate their roles as a family unit and make shifts to compensate for the loss. Finally, then, they move on.

What is unnatural then are when mothers reject their young, older brothers and sisters injure younger members, and adults turn playful sparring into serious injury. What’s happening is that they are taking on the neuroses of humans. They’re being forced to mirror us and forget their natural instincts. As intelligent and perceptive as they are, it almost appears that they “know that they know” about us – signs of “consciousness?” But that’s another discussion.

The question is then for us: Is our cousin who is supposedly lower on the food chain telling us to pay attention to something at a higher level than where we are? Are we missing something about which they are fully conscious? Or, do we still insist on looking down on our “dumb” friends which, at best, can only mimic us? It comes down to if we connect and how deeply – or not at all. To connect is not just enlightening and joyful; it brings pain with it as well – reminders of who/what we’ve become by contrast, and what we’re doing to nature. Hence, new stressors for ourselves. At the very least, it makes us revisit the meaning of “intelligence” all over again.

Some years ago Howard Gardner wrote about seven different kinds of creativity. He said creativity and intelligence are two different and unrelated things. But, in a way, perhaps unknowingly, as he explained the different ways creativity manifests, he was also exploring ways intelligence expressed itself. Creativity is “divergent” in nature. It seeks to expand possibilities. Whereas, intelligence, said Gardner, “converges.” It thinks deductively. But as he explored the creativity and intelligence of Einstein (science), Picasso (art), Stravinsky (music), Eliot (poetry), Graham (dance), and Gandhi (philosophy), intelligence had to find a centrifugal direction. It was too confining not to. Sooner or later creativity and intelligence had to meet up.

The intersection of those, in my view, is where we begin to explore nature’s deeper realms. And by understanding those, we finally get to understand elephants. It puts Darwin’s theory on its ear. Intelligence, as we’ve measured it up until now, may be upside down and backwards.

When intelligence and creativity fail to meet, they can actually sabotage one another by virtue of how “we” define them respectively (wrongfully). We then get anxiety and confusion. We’re going against instinctual grain. The question directly pertains to elephants: We know about their intelligence and sensitivity. But is an elephant also creative? How does it “bring new things into being,” (to define its meaning)? From a human standpoint, it appears to be impossible. In fact, only rarely do we see primates (some birds) “creating” new patterns, using tools, etc. Most are creatures of habit, and that’s that. Hence, we reward ourselves with the distinction of being creative.

But this is where elephants are asking us to rearrange our thinking altogether – if we choose to listen, if want to understand creativity at the next level. Creatures of the wild are basically “the creation” itself, not the creator. They’re like individual colors in a painting. While at the same time, each stroke of the brush, each color, expresses the whole picture. This is how intelligence crosses paths with creativity and expands. The elephant is just one expression of that while expressing all of nature. The solipsistic universe is dead.– Putting it another way, it’s all about getting out of our minds and allowing selflessness in. The new creative act is about putting ourselves aside for a higher intelligence.

When one piece begins to fade, the entire picture fades. When an elephant “loses it,” we all lose it. We are their suffering. The elephant is demonstrating our own social-mental pathology and holding us up to a mirror. “When the animals perish, we will all perish,” says an old Indian proverb. Watching them is spellbinding for a new reason: We’re seeing our own deaths before us.

And yet it’s the elephant, not us, which is steering us to another place, asking us to creatively get out of our own way and rejoin the real world. Up is down and down is up, even for us.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

WATCHING the MADNESS

The introverts among us must feel very strange and alone, but not in the ways we usually think. Count me among them, and I will say this: It isn’t about alienation but a kind of isolation rarely understood.

Let’s start with a world already gone insane. We exist in different phases of an oppressive climate, where centralized powers obliterate human rights and the human mind is reduced to child-lie states of obedience to authority. It’s called menticide, or the “killing of the mind.”

In a very Orwellian-Huxleyean way, “monotonously repeated nonsense has more emotional appeal than logic or reason,” said Dutch psychoanalyst Joost Meerloo. The senses are continuously overlooked by forced stimuli. We look for reasonable counter-arguments to all the lies. But subjugation overwhelms us with even more lies before we have a chance to catch up with them. It makes sure we are eternally “behind the curve.”

So, we end up no longer questioning the world which “the screen” gives us and/or all the answers to everything it dictates. Our normal human interactions are disrupted and completely terminated. Our thoughts are reprogrammed for a new virtual existence. Reason and common sense are no longer possible. Rational thought turns into “playhouses of irrational forces,” said Meerloo.

Accordingly then, it leads people into isolation, which becomes easy to exploit with yet more delusional coaxing and misguidance. The isolated have lost contact with all “corrective forces.”

But the naturally introverted among us have a different response. Instead of feeling like vulnerable targets for the “thought police,” we have an advantage. This is because we’re already in our element in isolation. The result isn’t alienation but perspective and clarity. I suppose this is why those with the most clarity about such forces are introverted types – writers and artists. They turn the tide; the aggressor becomes an aggressed upon.

What we introverts cannot avoid however is the long-term operant (Pavlovian) conditioning which makes for “conditioned responses” about life in general, branded into us quietly and slowly. We’re basically born already indoctrinated. It’s not unlike “crack babies” already helplessly addicted, or being introduced into an economy already dependent on fossil fuels. The drug pusher/oil company says “you can’t live without us” even as we try to “clean up.” Preconditioned thought patterns and communicative responses are drilled into us.

Carl Jung said that the way to heal is to first bring order to our minds, second to increase information access, then to use humor and satire to challenge the status quo. And finally to form “parallel structures” to indoctrination. That is, to organize from inside the totalitarian field and create a “second” (parallel) enclave of freedom and sanity. In other words, a subversive mindset. – Introverts listen and agree. They/We have already carved out their own niches inside the insane asylum. We have our own private corners.

The masses don’t know they’re mad because they have no Archimedean point from which to observe their collective madness. They try to solve their existential dilemma with the very tools which are themselves part of the madness. They go around in circles having no reference point. Introverts, by contrast, carve out their own reference points. It’s their way of staying anchored while being in society.

It also explains why introverts think more subversively in general. We’re more “watchers” than doers, and it’s easy to watch how negativity, fear, anxiety, and panic flood in by the very forces generated by the “doers.” What they call “healing” is mostly just the rearranging of our delusions. Meanwhile, the introvert stands, says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are balanced with the … capacity to act.”

The “subversive mind” is strange in this way. Whatever we hear and see, there’s a sidebar to it, warning us that it’s all theater and never too real. It’s not easy to do, but the warning is there nonetheless. Our good fortune is that our isolation affords us the space to remain in our seats and “watch.” We don’t always see the light in the heat of the moment, the narrative and plot, but it arrives eventually.

I’ve never been clearer in my life about the madness we now live in. Retirement has afforded me lots of “alone” time. And during this I’ve been able to organize my thoughts, perceptions, ideas, and beliefs to such a degree which was impossible when I was gainfully employed. Looking back on those “working” years, I can see how everyone was bombarded with social messaging which cemented a standard ideological view. We literally had no time or energy to think outside boxes. For one thing, it was too exhausting. Stress and exhaustion is a way to summon and maintain submission, obedience, and mindless conformity. Again, they “heighten susceptibility for descent into authoritarian control.”

Which summons yet another point about those earlier days. Introverts in general do not make good “team players.” We’re too much off on our own and avoiding group interaction. It festers and becomes a familiar complaint among employers. We are seldom candidates for pay raises. Instead, we keep yet another sidebar (red flag) up and running about the work environment. It’s an equitable trade-off for us.

The whole thing puts another light in the experience of isolation and alienation. The terms themselves are highly situational and relative. In a society like ours which is 80% extroverted, isolation is “symptomatic” because it automatically implies alienation. But in a society like England’s (80% traditionally introverted), isolation does not mean alienation. It’s a reorientation and grounding. The British rigorously protect their “alone time.” In Europe in general, one encounters many “tables for one” at sidewalk cafes – something Americans consider odd (and uncomfortable).

Introversion plays with an interesting dynamic. Separation fosters a kind of Oneness, or unity, that co-mingling with others does not. It’s almost like saying, to appreciate the full beauty of something, we must distance ourselves from it in order to see it. Separation facilitates an ability to weave elements together, which can only be done in one’s own time. And in so doing, the problem of menticide is kept at bay, unable to attack.

A second dynamic appears as well: A kind of madness appears unique to introverts. Again, relativity is the operative term. It’s the story of the village going mad for drinking the well water. Everyone goes mad together and at the same time; hence, no one knows they’re mad. A couple outsiders come along and see what’s happening. They’re thirsty and partake of the water anyway. But before drinking one says to the other, “We’ll place marks on our foreheads. That way, while joining the village, we will know that we’re mad.” Distance and isolation afford a similar advantage.

It’s an old story, but one that renews itself everyday. I look out my window, that small portal onto the world, and it’s enough to know. The world in microcosm, on the other side of the glass, is thankfully unaffected by the toxins of its hologrammed (larger) version. It is earthen, fertile, savage, in sync, sublime, beautiful, intelligent, ancient, immediate, and brutally honest. It’s a different madness because it’s pure and untouched by human hands. It is also slow, patient, methodical, and quiet.

Carl Jung saw introverts as the “promoters of culture” by showing the value of “the interior life which is so painfully wanting in our civilization.” Jung was prescient but also, alas, idealistic. We work slowly and deliberately, listen more than we talk, think before we speak. We also express ourselves better in writing than in conversation – not everyone’s cuppa tea – in a world set up for speed, highly decibelled white noise, and high anxiety. – Were it only true, though, if the world “out there” could just slow down enough to visit “in here,” long enough to look at itself. It’s not going to happen in my lifetime.

My one fear is that I live long enough to actually see the world spin off its hinges and into an irreversibly self-annihilating insanity. Unconsciously, it awaits a Biblical Armageddon – a conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil. It hasn’t arrived as predicted by religious zealots. So we will manifest our own and then call it the same thing. And with everyone basically dead or dying, we will sink into the worst insanity of all: that it was better to be right than alive. “Destroy the village to save it!” There’s the unforgettable political cartoon of the Wall Streeter climbing out of the rubble after nuclear war, and with his dying breath says, “But the Dow rose by one-tenth of a percent!!”

As an isolated introvert, I can say unabashedly that my closest friends include raccoons, deer, squirrels, birds, and cats. Susan Cain, in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Broadway: New York ,2012) pieced together a “Manifesto for Introverts.” And one of the rules reminds us that, “One genuine new friendship is worth a fistful of business cards.” The business cards received from my furry friends are rare, but getting one is a prize to behold. They are (RSVP) invitations to slip down a rabbit hole together. Only they know where those rabbit holes are. Milton wrote about “the happy person” who frolics in the countryside, meditates in the nighttime woods, and studies in a “Lonely Towr.” Touche.

I submit this piece in the open air, for everyone/anyone willing to join in. But I can just imagine the ratio of extroverts-to-introverts; that is, the average reader by now must certainly think I’m nuts! To which I have no rebuttal – I confess. But, again, it all comes down to one’s point of view, where one chooses to sit on the branches of the family tree. High, low, out on the edges, close to center. Every perch presents its own parallax, its own understanding. The important thing is to remember that it’s all the same tree – or “Lonely Towr.” And it doesn’t care where we sit.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

“CONTEMPT of CONSCIENCE”

A phrase borrowed from Inherit the Wind. “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind. And the fool shall be servant to the wise in heart” (Proverbs: 11:29). There are the fools who are “ghosts pointing an empty sleeve.” Then there’s the troubled chaos that only conscience can heal.

The phrase should be printed in Latin on the dollar bill, next to Novus Ordo Seclorum (“A News Cycle of the Ages”). And it somehow seems fitting that the “Third Eye of Horus” is directly above, looking straight at us. Because it’s conscience, or the absence of, which guides the boat we’re on in the 21^st century.

Conscience requires patience, and patience requires the slowing of time. One gets off the carousel and pushes the world away enough to glean perspective. And perspective locates conscience again – so far a bane of the 21^st century. The move is towards “autonomy,” a close cousin to “automaton,” which is second cousin to disaffection, separation, dissociation, and isolation. It’s how we now survive.

Conscience requires connectivity and awareness. It also requires empathy in the sense of feeling/relating/identifying with the other’s experience. It’s is the foundation of socialization, community, and belonging. All three are in peril today because the foundation is crumbling. The automaton survives alone instead. He lives in a bubble, in a cubicle, at a computer, in his car, inside earphones, in a smartphone. He’s self-sufficient while simultaneously convinced that he’s fully connected. Screen images, secondary sounds, and texting in real time make isolation feel like bonding.

Two forces are working in the opposite direction and at odds with each other. Theorist Donna Haraway describes one way with “The Cyborg Manifesto.” It addresses the direction we’re going in dissolving all “troubling dualisms.” It’s a socially unconscious but steady process of deconstructing ourselves – which is all well and fine. But at the same time it means a “dark night” first of terrible alienation. Technology always moves faster than what the human ego can assimilate and accept.

I see our culture dealing with both, first trying to come to terms with what’s going on, but not yet ready to understand the dynamics. The more we move toward cybernetic autonomy, the more violent and out of control we become. It’s a dynamo trying to find it’s own balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces.

What exactly is the Cyborg phenomenon? The cyborg contains everything necessary to fulfill itself. It is fully integrated in terms of oppositions. All boundaries break down. It is epicene but fully androgynous. It is also homeostatic, stable and completely balanced. It therefore leads to an image of the perfect “trans-/post-human.” (S)He/It is integrated not just with other humans but with animals and nature. This is another way of describing a “dehumanization” process, of not becoming less, but more. (S)He/It as a post-human figure is the deconstructed human. Haraway says it’s about “how not to be a man,” not to live in “phallocentric” boxes. In the New Age of robots, it signals a certain end (and beginning) in what it means to be human.

But the concept plays havoc with the ego, still firmly grounded in a geocentric/phallocentric universe. The world of oppositions must still be experienced “out there,” in nature while separate from nature. The cyborg concept does not eliminate dualism; it simply brings it inside, in the sense of becoming it. One is again fully integrated with everything, but it surrenders an old skin. Haraway does not elaborate further on the implications of this. But it basically taps into other famous metaphor systems used to describe the transcendent state (and of thanatological dying): The Christ archetype, individuation, the astrological “center” of the cosmic wheel, are just a few examples. They all share one thing in common: conscience.

As opposed to consciousness, which comes from the Latin scire cum “to know with.” It is “to know that we know.” Conscience on the other hand (Latin: conscire) also means to be conscious but goes a step further. It is to be conscious of guilt, moral goodness, of conduct, intentions, and character. It’s the faculty of enjoining good acts, all of which are reaffirmed by society (superego).

We get stuck between types of cyborgs. One is completely devoid of conscience while being at least partially (mass-)conscious. Another cyborg’s consciousness transcends mass-consciousness which means it knows moral goodness (it has conscience). The uneasy and tenuous middle-ground is where we seem to be stuck – and more towards the first type of cyborg.

The odd thing about it is, the one cyborg tries to speak to the other cyborg. The example of the butterfly talking to the caterpillar fits: The butterfly tries to awaken the caterpillar, while the caterpillar sees the other’s wings and says “You’ll never catch me up in one of those.” The latter has nothing but contempt for the butterfly. He “knows that he knows,” but it’s still not enough to bring him out of his pupal chrysalis. Metamorphosis cannot be rushed. It happens in its own time.

This is the reluctant hero in the hero’s journey scenario. Most want to be heroes, but on their own terms and in their own way. The “geocentric” human must control the process. Hence the heavy leaning on organized religion which is all about taking the journey on our terms and with plenty of wagers and deals with “conscience.”

Earning one’s wings is a terrible sacrifice. We want them and don’t want them (too much responsibility). When we get them, often times we don’t use them. We may leave the ground but get scared of too much altitude. We have the potential but no will. At best, we talk about higher things, theorize about them, but rarely ever have them. Hence, the magic and curse of language (Logos). It bridges but also separates and delays. Direct experience must be accompanied with enough separation to understand it. And understanding only comes for the ability to objectify it first – with words.

And so, here we are. We have enough clarity to know right from wrong, but less certainty about when or how to act. We see violence, and we either get involved or not – fight or flight. It’s the same with a “conscience of consciousness.” When both meet, consciousness springs ahead and expands. When they don’t meet, consciousness stalls and even slips back into its chrysalis.

Have you ever seen good, intelligent, seemingly evolved people “stall” in a situation when you expected them to respond responsibly? When some don’t, it’s because they haven’t enough conscience. Others are plagued with too much conscience, filled with guilt and regret. Still others don’t because they have neither one (conscience or consciousness).

It seems to be where our culture stands in the digital new century. In a very big way, we are our own teachers and enemies at the same time. Which is why we float in a kind of vacuum. It’s a culture of extremes. Some exult in a robotic/cybernetic environment. They seem to thrive, even though their environment is artificial. Others are chronically depressed. Suicidal ideation is at record levels in all demographic areas.

But what is also happening is that virtual realty is getting close to the reality we already experience. In a few years, say the experts, we won’t be able to know the difference. This is the human and cyborg becoming one and the same. It is the centripetal and centrifugal, real and unreal, merging into a fully integrated consciousness. The computer and self will be the same thing. The question is: What will it do to conscious?

It’s a difficult question to ask a computer screen. If I’m looking at myself, from where does the response initiate? Is it me, or not me? Even if I knew, would a conscience of “guilt, moral goodness, conduct, intentions, and character” even be a factor anymore? If the cyborg is all about the dissolution of “troubling dualisms” (oppositions), then does it matter? Would I know the difference? – Hence the moral vacuum we’re in.

As the hero “returns home,” will he even recognize it? Some will. Others won’t. We’ll all set sail for home, but some will drown. Others won’t even try to go. But a small minority, as always, will push off and actually reach the other shore. And they’re first worry will be that the shore itself is real and substantial – whatever “real” means anymore. They’ll have only to ask Microsoft and Google. They’ll even draw you a map.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

PRINCIPLES

As opposed to standards, rules, doctrines, tenets, policies and dogmas. Somehow a principle reaches for a higher criterion. Referring to one is to visit a more seasoned, if not loftier, stratosphere – time-tested, government-inspected, mother-approved.

That said, principles are funny things They are born, live and grow, give birth to more principles, mature and fade. They breathe life and die. They’re mindful of people who are socially relevant, then they’re not. We may look to them in old age for wisdom, but they don’t understand or accept life when it changes. The planet has gone on to another set of rules.

Principles join together, but they also divide. They separate science from religion, liberals from conservatives. Liberalism looks into the future, conservatism the past, and principles weigh in differently on both sides.

Some people do things they may not believe in, but they do them anyway because their principles say to. Such principles often lag behind change. They slow change down and even stop it sometimes. Future-oriented people tend to disregard principles for that reason; they can obstruct progress and efforts to think “outside boxes.” On the other hand, if a principle’s rule is to set aside all rules, it survives.

Principles give us standards. Standards are the bedrock of society. We say, for example, that democracy is the best form of government; governments are inefficient and corrupt; a worthy man always gets a job; laziness is a vice; the Constitution was divinely inspired; private property is a sacred right; and you can’t change human nature. Each provides a rule for conduct and moral judgment. Each is simple, clearly stated, and saves time. They are also based on “experience,” hence the past. So anything new sounds remotely dangerous. So we treat them like inviolable axioms and think nothing more of it. – Then the future arrives and spoils everything.

Principles appear to make life more tolerable and civilized. But they also let us shirk responsibility and moral judgment. We say, “Can’t help you, pal, because it’s not right,” even when it is. We also commit many unkind, even hateful, acts knowing we’re wrong. To believe that evil is “out there,” for example, and there’s nothing we can do about it, it makes scapegoating easy and even necessary – because the principle says to rein it in. The charge of “laziness” makes the problem of slums and reduced benefits for workers easier to live with. When “worthy” men get jobs, unemployment and homelessness can be ignored. Hence, the reason principles are a politician’s favorite escape clause.

A principle is as difficult to test as it is to disprove. It stays conveniently abstract and generic. It also stays safely couched in language, in the logic of simple deduction, slogans, catchphrases, platitudes, and soundbites. We all know, for example, that white is “brighter” than (hence preferable to) black, masculinity means strength, pigs are dirty and ugly (easier to torture and slaughter), stealing is always evil, and desperation calls for desperate measures (ends justifies means). Referential meanings are hidden deep in the subtexts of our most sacred doctrines.

Principles are also standard tools in the making of what was once called the “public relations industry,” now just known as propaganda. They get us to do what we ordinarily would never do. Patriotism and nationalism depend on it heavily. Without standard slogans and impressive one-liners we would never go to war to kill people. The military would suffer from low enlistments and budgets. As Edward Bernays himself said (first pioneer on the “science of manipulation”), only “intelligent” people are worthy of leading, propaganda is “good education,” governments depend on an “acquiescent” public, and “the few” should always rule “the many.” Orwell’s “doublethink” is necessary and good. It is then our moral responsibility to accept those standard codes of conduct. Citizens are also, by the way, inherently “lazy” (intellectually), which means they want to be told how to think and what to do. It’s a leader’s moral responsibility then to lead them “out of the darkness.”

If Americans held to fewer principles (not more), some argue that there would be no poverty, there wouldn’t have been a Great Depression, there would be no need for labor unions, the prospect for future wars would be remote, and (perhaps) there wouldn’t even be a Democratic versus Republican party (liberals and conservatives at each other’s throats).

You could also argue that just another principle would take over where the old one died. Not necessarily so, because the aim isn’t to live with fewer ideals and less justice but to make ideals and justice attainable. Principles get in the way of that. As an example, two sides can go to war over their respective principles – or – they can mediate a peaceful way to end conflict by dismissing those principles (of national security, national pride, world supremacy, manifest destiny, valor). It’s about rising above them and acting with moral clarity. It’s about putting our values in concrete terms and not getting fooled by specious rhetoric.

This, in a way, is the phenomenon which has affected Western religion in the last sixty years. The public has not just gotten more literate about history’s religious principles; it has also “grown up” about them. Old religious decrees, even a few Commandments, are worn out, irrelevant, and simply wrong. This is why the Catholic Church has suffered such a dramatic loss in membership in Europe and the United States in the last sixty years. The Pope visits the Third World more today than ever because the Vatican needs money. Fortunately for the Church, the Third world is still conveniently illiterate enough to adhere to its principles at face value. Christianity in general has lost memberships as well, while atheism (and a new phenomenon of people following their own convictions) has skyrocketed. People think for themselves now. The first “panic” from this was Vatican II in 1965.

There are principles, then there are principles — and let’s not confuse them. Mathematical principles apply absolutely, though they also modify themselves. Einstein proved that. The basic laws of science generally do not change (and there’s a principle which pays allegiance to that). But social and political principles are far less stable or permanent. They ebb and flow, appear and disappear, as they should. They change with the wind and must remain flexible to simply work. The Constitution is the prime example of something that knows this. This is why it’s survived for 247 years. It has suffered through generations of those wanting to attach their principles permanently to it. But its salvation has been in its deliberate vagueness, inviting those principles in but fixing itself to none. As Jefferson said in 1787, “the earth belongs to the living,.. the dead have neither power nor rights over it.”

Those who attempt to cement their principles into a permanent landscape kill the (First Amendment) right to produce different principles, fewer principles, and even no principles. They do it out of fear more than conviction. Just visit an evangelical Christian gathering (or FOX News) and listen, and you’ll get an earful of uncompromising principles. It’s interesting then that their defenders-apologists spend most of their time condemning others for theirs, instead of celebrating their own. Their backs are always against walls, defending the indefensible. They have to shore up their ranks, rekindle their illusions of validation, and state their cases over and over again – martyring it up. Meanwhile, their encampments shrink by the day. The only reason FOX survives is because of enormous corporate monies and billionaire benefactors profiting from their own twisted principles (and propaganda).

Way back in 1923, Ogden and Richards wrote The Meaning of Meaning. In it they examined the causes of miscommunication. In a sense, the general purpose and function of principles were to keep order, social control, keep communication at a “fixed” level, and to keep people indoctrinated into a controlling system. Too much honesty and truth endangered that. It’s no less true today. The “structural idea” is what’s still important. How referents “hang together” determines everything, and those become the principles which provide standard rules of judgment and conduct. In 1938, Stuart Chase titled his book, The Tyranny of Words. An extension of tyranny should also be ascribed to principles, because they’re just words strung together in order to fabricate meanings, and principles, to generate “order.” ¹ Tyranny means “oppressive power” which means we need to watch our words and where they go.

Bottom line: We need to examine exactly what our most used principles are and scrutinize them. The simplest and most basic ideas of “goodness” are exploited more and more today. Examples: “Guns are patriotic,” “Marriage is between a man & woman,” “It’s a Christian nation,” “Capitalists haggle, they don’t lie.” “Immigration is Communism,” “A strong military is a strong America,” and “Make America Strong Again” (principles have been abandoned).

An inventory of principles, the elimination of some, the cleansing of others, might be replaced by others which just promote more manipulation. But then they need to be held to the fire as well. It calls for a regular “house-cleaning” to remove the smoke and debris standing in the way of moral clarity and sound judgment. If we don’t do this, our politicians, clerics, and moral philosophers certainly won’t do it for us.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt .

1When William James was asked to define philosophy, he responded, “Just words, words, words.”

DECONSTRUCTING DECONSTRUCTION

Lots of people, academic and nonacademic, have scorned the very idea of deconstruction over the years, especially since the days of Derrida, the so-called “father of deconstruction.” ¹ Even some of my favorite freethinkers, like Hitchens and Chomsky, have dismissed it as mental gymnastics, a futile intellectual exercise, and sophistry. It goes “nowhere,” said Chomsky. Okay. However, it’s the very “meaning of meaning” that approaches ever-closer, everyday. The rules are changing.

This is why I keep coming back to this subject, almost ritually. The shift into the Digital Age sparked a quantum shift in human cognition. To me, it made everything, as Paul Tillich might say, “absolutely relative.” The world began deconstructing itself without it knowing, because everything (including our understanding of “everything”) has been shrinking (and expanding) to the level of “signs,” signifiers and signifieds. The smallest and simplest concepts are doors into the most mind-blowing (expansive, complex) horizons.

Deconstruction took off where Sartre and existentialism stopped. Sartre and others kept the argument in the broad context of “being” versus “nothingness,” freedom and choice, making rational decisions in an irrational universe, on whether there is “purpose” in life. It did not yet analyze existence down to “meanings behind meanings,” signs, the assumptions of binary opposition (the law of “noncontradiction”). That came a generation later with the French freethinkers. Then it really took hold with the switch into digital technology. And today we’re swimming in uncertainties like never before. And the more we try to correct it, the deeper we dig our holes, because the methods used is the problem we’re trying to solve.

What’s required is a quantumly different understanding of ourselves in relation to “everything.” In the West, it’s an incredibly deep subject being approached by the most long-winded and circuitous methods to arrive at what (in the East) seems to translate to the simplest principles. To be honest, I personally don’t know why thinkers like Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, Barthes, Culler, et alia, do not simply cut to the chase. But they don’t. Unless they simply don’t understand Eastern thought, calling it just another theory (just like “Hegelian dialectics” is just another “dynamic process”). But at the same time they use words like “sublation” (Becoming), “third terms” (denoting transcendence), circles of circles” (the ouroboros), and sous rature or “by erasure” (“not this, not that”).

Poststructuralism also goes beyond its “structuralist” predecessor by denying a “third order” – that space between the concrete and the abstract which reserves a place for the self. In this “post” phase, there no longer is any “self.” There is no center either which can be intellectually/rationally conceived. The Japanese use the word Mu to indicate “not this.” MuDo means “no thing way.” The Hindus use the phrase neti, neti to mean “not this, not that.” Deconstruction attempts to approach reality in term of what it is not – by erasure.

Nietzsche mentions the “unnameable.” For what exceeds the grasp of available concepts he says there are simply “no available words.” To give it an expression is to instantly lose it, to fall back into known terminology. Deconstruction itself then falls into the trap so well voiced by Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” – Likewise, “It is not possible to say anything about deconstruction without using the very resources of that which is to be deconstructed,” said scholar and author, David Gunkel.

The French keep “backing up” as if to dodge strategies and methods which trap us back in binary oppositions. The poststructuralists backed up far enough to dissect language into signifiers (words, sounds) and signifieds (meanings). But the dodge is futile. “The definition of any word, if pursued far enough through the dictionary, will lead you in circles. Signs, therefore, do not refer to things that exist outside the system of signs; signs refer to other signs” (Gunkel).

Strangely then, they stop where the principles of Eastern thought (Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism) take over. They hesitate going that one extra (ontological) step of going beyond that which refuses to die – ego. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll just back up into another meta-narrative (“man seeking his telos”). Indeed, as Gunkel said at the end of his book, Deconstruction (MIT Press: London, 2021):

“In the final analysis… deconstruction is neither a form of critical analysis nor does it seek out, achieve, or have any pretensions to finality. It is and can only take place as an endlessly open form of engagement with existing systems of thought in an effort to challenge the status quo and provide potent opportunities to think, speak, and act otherwise. This does not mean that… anything goes and all things are permitted.”

It is simply to “open onto alternative opportunities and challenges that can make a difference.” In other words, it wants to facilitate but not give up the “third order” (self). The West just isn’t ready.

Eastern thought brings it home and carries the question to its penultimate root. The ego is like an onion: peel its layers and at its core is nothing. This is not nihilism. It is pure consciousness. – I suppose French (and American) intellectuals are seeking a complex term of their own with which to label it without giving into spiritualism at the same time. For the record, Buddhism is not a system. It isn’t even a religion or philosophy. It is a psychology – not speculative and academic but “direct and experiential? Meditation is about thanatological death (to ego), about “not this, not that.” It steps beyond the veil of binary opposites.

The deities (gods and goddesses) of Hinduism and Buddhism point to an “ultimate reality and source” of all existence. Their deities not even “creators” as we think of a Biblical Genesis, because that suggests non-creation. It includes even the separation from itself in order to observe itself (binary opposition). It “plays” with dualist scenarios. We play with suffering in order to experience bliss. We know black by knowing white, etc. It plays “hide & seek” with itself while knowing what lies hidden behind the play. The image we have of a “center” (or “Oneness”) is whatever one wants to call it (but, again, it’s just a word). And as Alan Watts once said, “When learning how to be a real person, you’re learning how to be a genuine fake.” (The word person means “mask,” taken from the ancient Greco-Roman theater – dramatis personae).

I think there is an almost deliberate effort in the West to misinterpret Eastern psychology. We relegate it to “philosophy 101” freshman courses in college and treat it like just another “-ism.” Just another theory alongside others. The only religion, by the way, not treated like an “-ism” is Christianity – no elitism there! Christians bridle when I fit it alongside all the others and call it Christianism. But that’s another story.

The question today is, “how direct is direct?” What is an “experience?” The deconstruction rule is to always question “the premise behind the premise, the proof behind the proof” – until one gets to the center of the onion. In retrospect, there actually is a reason the West does not go to “the center.” It would mean the total collapse of everything. This is a journey which can only be taken by individuals and in incremental steps where one reaches a state of “Self-Actualization,” “Selfhood,” or “Oneness.” Deconstruction, as we will see, avoids that final “death.”

There are basically two ways of arriving at the proverbial “center.” They can be described by way of a digital clock – versus – a rotary clock. The rotary clock goes through each second before it reaches the top of another minute. The digital clock remains at the same second until it “flips” into the next minute. Most individuals transcend the world of “binary opposites” incrementally, one second at a time. Others (a few) “flip” into the next hour/day/year in leaps – until they are the clock, and then there is no clock (and/or time/space).

Using that analogy and in the slowest manner conceivable, most of us are plodding along “second-to-second,” “minute-to-minute.” We even manage to miraculously stop the clock and allow the second-hand to seemingly regress backwards – a mechanism called “denial.” As a culture, we have a long way to go in that regard; that is, if the Doomsday Clock doesn’t reach its own “nuclear midnight” first.

And yet the Digital Age has put us a few seconds ahead of ourselves. Just far enough to have us all confused and disoriented. What we use to compensate for that (some call it syncope) are artificial anodynes and synthetic/virtual realities – Baudrillard’s simulacrum – “imitations without originals.” We also try to compensate with the invention of strange neologisms. As an example, Donna Haraway took the term “cyborg” to mean that which exceeds all oppositional thinking. And since oppositional polarities usually imply one polarity dominating the other, she also meant it to transcend all forms of oppression, domination, and marginalization. It doesn’t deconstruct, but it’s one way the digital age is dealing with our existential malaise.

Words are still words, and they throw us right back into our conceptual universe of “noncontradicition” and its rules. The foundations we stand on (and believe in) are quicksand, because “I-My-Me-Mine” (Heidegger’s Dasein: “existence”) is also quicksand. There is no foundation, and that becomes the only foundation.

Far shy of that however, we still struggle at a much more primitive level – as I say, we’re “plodding.” We grapple with (and through) language to get to different horizons. Lacan is the only thinker I know of who addresses the “ego” directly and links it to language. He addresses the unconscious, dreams, and the fact that words have multiple meanings which signify things different than what ego wants them to mean. In fact, he says that language is the condition for the personal unconscious (as opposed to the “collective unconscious”), that dreams are also saying something quite different than what ego translates them to mean. In contrast to those who say, “Cogito, ergo sum,” Lacan says, “I think where I am not, therefore, I am where I do not think.” Or, “I think where I cannot say that I am.”

If these are not Buddhist koans, I don’t know what are. (Koans “short-circuit” the mind-ego so it cannot ask any more questions). — The closest we come to this in the West is by way of aporia (aporetic thinking): a philosophical puzzle, paradox, logical disjunction, conundrum, or unresolvable impasse which just leads to another impasse.

In all, this is (in my view) why deconstruction (the poststructuralists) are so rejected in the West, even when they stop short of “ego death.” From the East I have heard no responses at all about it. And I think it’s because they see western philosophers going the “long way around the barn” to get where they already are. They see the West in an endless free-fall of Herculean-Sisyphus-ian “uphill” heroic odysseys (violent, twisted/thick/dense, grueling, competitive, aggressive, adversarial, testosterone-ego-driven) every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Our dreams, the language coming from the unconscious, are interpreted very differently (if at all) here, which explains the power of language and its ultimately fatal blow to the psyche. The West will simply not give up its dominions and absolutes. “Otherwise,” said one Christian, “we disappear!” And we simply can’t have that!

I keep coming back to the discovery made years ago of the ancient, stone-age (now extinct) Brazilian tribe whose entire language consisted of nothing but verbs. How easy, yet how difficult it would be, for Westerners to spend a day (even just a few minutes) communicating using just verbs. The first result would be the ego “freaking out.” It simply will not stand to be pushed aside for an entirely different consciousness – of “direct experience.” It would push its way in and say “okay, enough.” And the duality of subject-object (I-Thou) would resume its dominion. But as long as we can manage to keep the “I” out of the way, simply watch what happens. It changes our consciousness completely. In a very real way, “we” die (our Christian’s biggest nightmare). Everything is process or Becoming (Hegel’s “sublation”). Being and nothing becomes becoming.

From a Western medical standpoint or understanding (to “stand under” it all), this is all nuts! It is certifiable insanity. But it really isn’t. Again, it is just consciousness, not an overpowering psychosis. One can function in the world and be unattached to the world. Functioning does not require an “arrested” consciousness. An analogy is, again, that of the Christian insisting that religion is required to preserve morality and goodness. It says we simply cannot live without it and be civil at the same time (historically, it’s the opposite). But history aside, we are in fact already born with an innate understanding of right and wrong, good and evil, without religion. We know what’s important, and what isn’t. It is “religion” which in fact corrupts that, redefines/indoctrinates, and sends us to war. Christopher Hitchens was absolutely correct when he said, “Religion poisons everything.” – Morality and religion are non sequiturs; consciousness and insanity are non sequiturs.

Measure the depths to which religion and philosophy keep us all enthrall to myths and diversions, and you have a pretty good idea of how far we have to go on that long journey back to first beginnings. Language leads the way. The tragedy of our current time is that, due to the digital age we’re in, we don’t see or understand the language of deconstruction trying to break through. When we do see it, we deny it and call it rubbish. We explain it away. But it’s also the language coming from dreams. It’s also a language which resides even beyond deconstruction itself – the ultimate surrender of existence into a new and very different existence – of becoming. As Buckminster Fuller once said, “I seem to be a verb.”

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

1Of course we know it’s not true. Derrida was neither unique nor original. Plato’s Phaedo reflects on first beginnings, and Socrates almost gave up his own search until he started investigating the logos. It was there that he ran into the problem of meaning. He said that looking at things “in logos” is still “looking at them in images.” One of my favorite books is an original copy of The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase, published in 1938. The first words are, “This book is an experiment. Is it possible to explain words with words? Can some of the reasons why it is so difficult for us to communicate with one another by means of language be set forth in that same faulty medium?” Then there’s The Meaning of Meaning published in 1923 by Ogden and Richards, and The Control of Language (1939) by King and Ketley. – So Derrida, born in 1930, was definitely not the “father” of anything, except maybe his children.

GUILT

… the problem of doling it out, then dealing with it when it returns. When Thorstein Veblen studied the leisure class, he was forced to present the most inflicting indictment against America: the guilt of ritual tithings to institutions pledged to “conspicuous consumption” (and money). Indirectly, he cast a moral edict down from the hemispheres of truth, direct from Mephistopheles and the veil of expedience.

Money still expunges guilt. It’s a one-trick pony. But other things quickly subdue guilt as well. For example, purchasing those things designed to give “the impression of” compassion and understanding – social services, subsidies, charities, the Salvation Army, thrift stores. And still another, in the manner of how we mourn. The more we grieve for the right things, the more virtuous we appear to ourselves.

The first time the real “art” of mourning hit me was when Jon Benet Ramsey was killed and it became a national outrage. The more media coverage she got, the more glaring was our lust for purity and vindication. But from what? From a clear bias for racial and economic preference. The more we protested that allegation, the more obvious it was and the more we stood naked before the truth.

The national obsession over Ramsey was at the same level of a national disaster and the outbreak of war. It spoke volumes. Which was also not new, It’s as old as the Lindbergh baby and white settlers on the “wild” frontier. It illustrated the latitudes of a well-engineered lie, the toxins of flattery, and the assumptions of virtue. The appointments of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and Madeleine K. Albright as Secretary of State in the 1980s were also telling. The official record concealed a congenital selfishness, the obsession with “PC,” media impressions, pandering to corporate benefactors and mythmakers. But even more, the guilt of deep-seated bigotry and racism.

When Bush, Jr. said race was not a factor (“I don’t see it at all, he’s clean and articulate”) and Clinton said gender “had nothing to do with her getting the job,” the lies were as thick as the insults themselves. Their reactions rendered both true. ¹ When the media told the story of Thomas, a poor black boy struggling through the Georgian rain to “arrive” in Washington, they didn’t mention he was also toting a wagon of extremist theories. But it didn’t matter. Albright and Thomas were both “on display” in front of a national audience, like prize fish, to atone for national guilt. Even Anita Hill didn’t compare to the humiliation of becoming the token black man, and for Albright, the token migrant citizen.

War also expunges guilt, which is why we need it every 25 years. Lloyd deMause from the Association for Psychohistory drew intriguing analogies to cultures dead and gone. Human sacrifices to the gods were ritually made when life became “too prosperous,” too indulgent, promiscuous, materialistic, and hedonist. The amassed guilt of every other generation had to be abluted and washed clean. So, we send a entire generation of young men to their deaths, as if to an angry volcano god. They’re tossed into the fire alive, and the tribe lives another 25 years.

The First World War was a replay of ancient Greece and Rome. It served its purpose by handing the gods young men on both sides of the Rhine. The Christ on one side engaged the Antichrist on the other, only to discover Satan running the war itself in the minds of politicians and generals. Debts paid, the winners took from the vanquished and resumed the rites of victory and economic plunder. For Germany, the terrifying “Father”(-land) claimed its human harvest but sank into “depression,” as did the Allies. The “Crash” of 1929 was more than just an economic disaster. The 1920s may have been “Roaring,” but it was also a decade of dealing with tremendous trauma, loss, and guilt.

Dennis Stillings made the same analogy to Hiroshima. It was the penultimate divine cleansing for both sides of the war. It made humankind clean again. The aftermath was “replete with images of peace.” Victims “did not cry out” but were “polite, helpful and generous.” Ground zero “blossomed like no other area of Japan.” Ground Zero was peaceful and purified. It was almost heavenly.

Outward gestures only soften inner struggles. It’s an exorcism to temporarily subdue three Faustian problems: first, guilt for moral failure as “children and parents”; second, guilt for our unworthiness as a society; and third, guilt for the lies we carry which we cannot live without. Jon Benet Ramsey comes to mind again. Is it not “racism” knowing that if she were not white, videogenic and cute, the case would not have stirred up so much attention over so many years? So much obsession is about trying to “deny the denial of” white racism and class. It only exposes a “denial” of denying the denial.

Suffice it to say, the litany of voices in politics, media, and talk-radio always answer the call: that is, the need to find ways to release our demons. Nothing’s changed since the Ramsey case (or since Custer’s Last Stand for that matter, or the slave ships from Africa). We still prefer the glow of purifying abstraction, the expedient lie, the ready-made cliché/platitude/bromide/soundbite/catchphrase and the injunction to ignore what lies beneath the “official” record.

The recent epidemic of guns is just “upping the ante” in trying to erase the same guilt. Forget war and racism (even those don’t purify fast enough anymore). Simply arm everyone to the teeth! That way individual citizens can do the ablutions themselves. It’s easier, faster, and costs the government nothing. Guns are now the “great cleanser.” They exact finality on every street corner, school, and convenience store.

The more I hear and see the media showing up at scenes of violence, and the more I hear public reactions of contempt and disgust, the more I witness genuflections to the volcano god for mercy and forgiveness. “Is this enough for you?” we ask. We express our grief and anger but expect nothing for it. Because its done for a purpose – never admitted or expressed openly. After losing a son or daughter to violence, we look to God for special compensation, a gift in return. But the irrepressible volcano is just another failed bargain with the devil.

We attend church, help the poor, rescue the helpless, say the Pledge of Allegiance, and endorse “kinder, gentler” lifestyles as defined by our moral handbooks and “Better Living through Jesus.” Each and every event and (anti-)hero that comes out of that takes on an important aura of saintliness and iconic conveyance. They deliver us from evil, and from ourselves. The contracts we draw up with each other, made into laws and norms, carried out by institutions and policies, supported by leaders and “heroes,” are the most brilliant and insidious “deals” of all time.

But as times change, so must the forms through which guilt is expressed. We cannot literally go to war anymore (it would end everything), and the mechanisms of technology and progress has us all on a “24 hour news cycle” of self-disclosure. Meaning, secrets and denials are more exposed and scrutinized than ever. Nothing is left to chance or left unexamined. What does that do with our talents to conceal ritual guilt?

The dilemma has reached an existential axis. The scrim of white virtue and national innocence is gone. It leaves us all floating in a vacuum waiting to be filled again. But with what? To date, all we have currently are our guns and serial shootings in schools, churches, and malls. It’s enough for now, but not for long. It won’t last. It’s just a “fix.” Besides that, all we have are “limited” wars (skirmishes) and civil wars (most of which are none of our business)

What I see happening through it all is a culture being bathed in guilt while standing in a cold darkness. It will have to wrestle with itself for some time before it’s ready to face many horrible truths. If it survives, what comes out the other end will be an entirely new and different kind of citizenry. If we don’t survive it, the reaction will be to continue our denials until they reach a penultimate violence. The most desperate measure of all (war) will be our last Hail Mary to keep our guilt hidden. – Watching Vladimir Putin today is to witness denial being played out to a bitter end (either his own, Russia’s, or even the world’s).

The guilt still won’t be gone, but we will be. The “axis” we stand on moves in two directions: one towards more denial (the guilt of yet more guilt), the other towards confession, contrition, and humility. All we can hope for is that we grow up enough to face it, share it, and embrace the vaults of our human kindredness. We all sit at the same table. Maybe we can accept that.

(c) 2023 Richard Hiatt

1When Trump “loves” Blacks, when Ron DeSantis “supports” education, and when Margorie Taylor Greene talks about race, gender, Russia, Nazis, and Christian nationalism, it’s a slap in the face of white Americans choosing instead to face their guilt.