Well, so now Charles A. Reich, who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame in 1970 with his Sixties manifesto The Greening of America recently passed on. Roger Kimball has a long piece about him at American Greatness.
What caught my attention was Reich's notion of the Three Consciousnesses, as follows, from La Wik:
Do you see what is missing? Call it "Consciousness 0," except that I don't think there is a zero in Roman numerals. It's the consciousness of the People of the Subordinate Self, people who nestle up to a powerful leader -- in Consciousness II -- and surrender themselves as foot-soldiers in his power project.
But really, I find Reich's notion interesting, because of what it tells us about our liberal friends. It tells us that a gay professor like Reich knows that the welfare state is not the last word in human evolution. Who knew?
However, you will notice that our liberal friends have not proposed any reform of the liberal administrative welfare state they have built. So even though all evolved people have moved on to the creative project of Consciousness III they still need the structures of Consciousness II. And you can see why. Our liberal friends obtain their political power and the resources for their creative projects by staffing the bureaucratic slots of Consciousness II, keeping the peasants -- of Consciousness 0 that does not even exist in the world of the Three Consciousness slots! -- enslaved to entitlement programs and whacking deplorable racist sexist homophobes from their fire-bases in corporate HR. They must keep the sub-human rubes under control even as they explore the cosmos of intersectionality and creativity from their safe spaces.
Also, Reich leaves out what we might call Consciousness IV, which is the label I would put on the German notions from Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung, the understanding that consciousness is only a pimple stuck on the vast unknown of the unconsciousness, and that "personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs" are a wet and adolescent first attempt at the Hero's Journey into the unconscious in which terrible monsters are experienced, and from which the creative person does not necessarily return. And only when the Hero has passed his trials in the underworld does he return as the Sacrificial Hero that has acquired the wisdom that empowers him to guide those left behind on the terrible border between Order and Chaos upon which he is called to sacrifice himself, to die so that others may live.
You can see that Reich's hot mess is nothing compared to the glorious vision afforded for the adepts of my Three Peoples notion. Let us express it in a way close to his own Three Consciousnesses notion.
Subordinate Consciousness applies to the dawning self-consciousness expressed in a felt lack of agency in the slave, the serf, the worker, the employee in a big bureaucracy. Their reality is the subordination to the will of the overlord who makes all the decisions and who we would say shamelessly exploits and sacrifices the subordinate in the pursuit of his power project.
Responsible Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that experience themselves as responsible, usually to God, for the actions of their lives. The idea is to conform one's life not to the power of an earthly lord who eventually betrays those that follow him, but to a heavenly lord who a dispenses a perfect heavenly justice. These people are self-conscious as responsible agents before God.
Creative Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that have come to believe tht it is not enough just to live a responsible life, but that humans are called to create, to be, in the words of Nietzsche, a free spirit. But, the creative realizes, the creative life is not a walk in the park with an occasional blast from a mind-altering drug, but a terrifying journey into the unexplored land of the unconscious, and the frightful temptations and monsters therein. Nor does the journey end with prizes and encomiums and "good jobs" and all, but with the sacrifice of which the Passion of Christ is the model. In fact, the sign that the hero is a false hero is that his life is a power project of self-worship rather than the equivocal fate of the Sacrificial Hero or the Scapegoat. Read all about it in Rene Girard and Violence and the Sacred.
You can see the Big Problem with our liberal friends. Their project always ends up as self-worship, demanding that the world genuflect before their wonderfulness.
Sorry, dear liberals. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not like that at all.
What caught my attention was Reich's notion of the Three Consciousnesses, as follows, from La Wik:
Consciousness I applies to the typical values and opinions of rural farmers and small businesspeople which dominated society in 19th century America.
Consciousness II represents a viewpoint of "an organizational society", featuring meritocracy and improvement through various large institutions, the ethos of the New Deal, World War II and the 1950s Silent Generation.
Consciousness III represents the worldview of the 1960s counterculture, focusing on personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs.OK. So Consciousness I is the bourgeois ethos; Consciousness II is the educated ruling class ethos of socialism and the administrative state; Consciousness III is the ethos of creative artists and activists and stuff, the vision that our liberal friends have of themselves.
Do you see what is missing? Call it "Consciousness 0," except that I don't think there is a zero in Roman numerals. It's the consciousness of the People of the Subordinate Self, people who nestle up to a powerful leader -- in Consciousness II -- and surrender themselves as foot-soldiers in his power project.
But really, I find Reich's notion interesting, because of what it tells us about our liberal friends. It tells us that a gay professor like Reich knows that the welfare state is not the last word in human evolution. Who knew?
However, you will notice that our liberal friends have not proposed any reform of the liberal administrative welfare state they have built. So even though all evolved people have moved on to the creative project of Consciousness III they still need the structures of Consciousness II. And you can see why. Our liberal friends obtain their political power and the resources for their creative projects by staffing the bureaucratic slots of Consciousness II, keeping the peasants -- of Consciousness 0 that does not even exist in the world of the Three Consciousness slots! -- enslaved to entitlement programs and whacking deplorable racist sexist homophobes from their fire-bases in corporate HR. They must keep the sub-human rubes under control even as they explore the cosmos of intersectionality and creativity from their safe spaces.
Also, Reich leaves out what we might call Consciousness IV, which is the label I would put on the German notions from Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung, the understanding that consciousness is only a pimple stuck on the vast unknown of the unconsciousness, and that "personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs" are a wet and adolescent first attempt at the Hero's Journey into the unconscious in which terrible monsters are experienced, and from which the creative person does not necessarily return. And only when the Hero has passed his trials in the underworld does he return as the Sacrificial Hero that has acquired the wisdom that empowers him to guide those left behind on the terrible border between Order and Chaos upon which he is called to sacrifice himself, to die so that others may live.
You can see that Reich's hot mess is nothing compared to the glorious vision afforded for the adepts of my Three Peoples notion. Let us express it in a way close to his own Three Consciousnesses notion.
Subordinate Consciousness applies to the dawning self-consciousness expressed in a felt lack of agency in the slave, the serf, the worker, the employee in a big bureaucracy. Their reality is the subordination to the will of the overlord who makes all the decisions and who we would say shamelessly exploits and sacrifices the subordinate in the pursuit of his power project.
Responsible Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that experience themselves as responsible, usually to God, for the actions of their lives. The idea is to conform one's life not to the power of an earthly lord who eventually betrays those that follow him, but to a heavenly lord who a dispenses a perfect heavenly justice. These people are self-conscious as responsible agents before God.
Creative Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that have come to believe tht it is not enough just to live a responsible life, but that humans are called to create, to be, in the words of Nietzsche, a free spirit. But, the creative realizes, the creative life is not a walk in the park with an occasional blast from a mind-altering drug, but a terrifying journey into the unexplored land of the unconscious, and the frightful temptations and monsters therein. Nor does the journey end with prizes and encomiums and "good jobs" and all, but with the sacrifice of which the Passion of Christ is the model. In fact, the sign that the hero is a false hero is that his life is a power project of self-worship rather than the equivocal fate of the Sacrificial Hero or the Scapegoat. Read all about it in Rene Girard and Violence and the Sacred.
You can see the Big Problem with our liberal friends. Their project always ends up as self-worship, demanding that the world genuflect before their wonderfulness.
Sorry, dear liberals. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not like that at all.
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