We all know the Breitbart dictum, that politics is downstream from culture. That is to say, before you "win" in politics you need to win the culture. Then I read sci-fi writer John C. Wright, and he extended the maxim: "politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion."
How true. And that is the problem for conservatives right now, that not only do our liberal friends have control of the culture, through literature, education, the arts, journalism, but also through the dominatory hegemony of their secular lefty religion of political correctness.
For instance, I was to several Shakespeare plays over the last year, from Seattle, to Ashland, Oregon, to Stratford-on-Avon, UK, and every one of the plays had modern LGBT gender-bending. So this means that, over the whole English-speaking arts world, the culture of the educated elite and its promotion of LGBT culture is hegemonic. Personally, for me, this is unfortunate, because I believe that LGBT culture is dull and superficial. But you better not dissent from the idea that having general gender chaos in Shakespeare with women playing male roles and lesbians and transgenders showing up all over, because homophobia.
Now, I believe that the reason that today's elite culture is so superficial issues from the superficiality of its religion. The elite religion is that the current elite creative culture is the only thing in town: everything else is bigotry and superstition. The purpose of today's elite culture is that we elites get to practice our elite creative culture and your job is to like it. And the more it humiliates you racist sexist homophobe proles, the better.
I would say that the most bigoted and superstitious religion in history is the current superficial religion of creativity of our educated elite. But what would I know?
I believe that an authentic creative culture would issue from an authentic creative religion. And that religion would echo the Jungian notion that the creative process exists on the borders of order and chaos and that usually the creative experience ends in disaster for the would-be creator and also for those associated with him. Thus a true religion of creativity would be drenched in the humility of that knowledge, that the true creative hero is a tragic hero, a sacrificial hero.
Now we travel into new territory.
It seems to me that the function of religion is to translate and transform our unconscious instincts into the conscious culture of a religion. Obviously -- or, at least, obvious to me -- the nature of that transformation will reflect the reality on the ground and the needs of the particular human community that the religion serves. The religion of a hunter-gatherer band will be different from the religion of an agricultural people will be different from the religion of a city people will be different from the religion of a creative educated elite. And this is right and proper.
Now I think -- from five minutes ago -- that the religion of a people tends to be specific and conscious, and its purpose is to set the parameters for the unconscious culture of that people.
Huh?
Well, I think that the purpose of religion is to reformulate and redirect the unconscious instincts of a human group to set its members up to inhabit a new world of unconscious instinct -- that we call culture -- adapted by some prophetic visioniary to suit the new world of the group and to train its members how to act in their everyday lives, by consciously putting on the new suit of the religion and thereafter unconsciously wearing that new suit in day-to-day life.
On this notion, politics would be the conscious expression of the culture in connection with the specific communal problems of the society, and specifically those questions that require the use of force, of which the major items are the defense of the community from enemies foreign and domestic.
The point is that normally the day-to-day culture of the people will resolve all problems, because people instinctively and unconsciously follow the unwritten rules of the culture. But those that do not respond to gentle persuastion need specific encouragement -- perhaps throught the use of force -- and problems that seem to be beyond the ability of the unconscious culture rise to consciousness in the rhetoric of politics to be dispatched by communal decision and executed by government force.
It seems to me that the actual operation of government is, again, a return to unconscious process. The fact is that government goes on in its dilatory way, in its various programs of government force, from the collection of taxes to the policing of criminals to the education of children, in another unconscious culture, where people are not really thinking about what is going down. People do not think about being forced to pay taxes or send their children to government school, but they pay their taxes and send their children to school. They obey the law without really thinking about it.
Only when the application of government force is experienced on the receiving end as injustice does it then rise to consciousness and into politics.
Now you can see why the Breitbart dictum about politics being downstream from culture is important. Because culture is an unconscious thing. It is what it is, and it does what it does. And one of the thing it does is set the agenda for politics by setting the unconscious agenda of what "everyone" accepts as day-to-day reality. So, if you don't like the way that politics frames the problems of society you now realize that to do that you have to change the culture.
But then, you understand, after John C. Wright, that to change the culture you need to change the religion.
And that is not a small thing.
As I say, the problem with the world at this time is that its educated elite has developed a false and malicious religion. Its religion of creativity is a religion of self-worship that basically says that everything that educated creative people do is good and anyone that disagrees with them is a racist sexist homophobe that should be named, shamed, ostracized, canceled, fired from their job. And think themselves lucky that they haven't been sent to the guillotine.
Now I think that we have all the knowledge we need to solve this problem. We have the psychology of Jung which explains how our conscious culture is necessarily entangled with our personal unconscious and with all the collective unconscious and its archetypes down the ages. We have Nietzsche telling us that creativity is a hard and lonely path, as his Zarathustra explained. We have the developmental psychologists from Piaget to Wilber that demonstrate how different people have different levels of consciousness and how only people inhabiting the higher levels can understand people at lower levels, and that people at lower levels think that people not at their level are either dumb idiots or crazy loons.
What we need is our creative class to understand that only a few people are ready for a religion of creativity. Most of the rest of us don't want to live creatively and wouldn't know how to anyway. So a True Religion of Creativity would start with the knowledge that the creative life is not for everyone.
And most important of all, the True Religion of Creativity would start with the advice of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Do you know what the advice was? There are variations, but it starts with advice to a young actress being bothered by the affections of older actors.
How true. And that is the problem for conservatives right now, that not only do our liberal friends have control of the culture, through literature, education, the arts, journalism, but also through the dominatory hegemony of their secular lefty religion of political correctness.
For instance, I was to several Shakespeare plays over the last year, from Seattle, to Ashland, Oregon, to Stratford-on-Avon, UK, and every one of the plays had modern LGBT gender-bending. So this means that, over the whole English-speaking arts world, the culture of the educated elite and its promotion of LGBT culture is hegemonic. Personally, for me, this is unfortunate, because I believe that LGBT culture is dull and superficial. But you better not dissent from the idea that having general gender chaos in Shakespeare with women playing male roles and lesbians and transgenders showing up all over, because homophobia.
Now, I believe that the reason that today's elite culture is so superficial issues from the superficiality of its religion. The elite religion is that the current elite creative culture is the only thing in town: everything else is bigotry and superstition. The purpose of today's elite culture is that we elites get to practice our elite creative culture and your job is to like it. And the more it humiliates you racist sexist homophobe proles, the better.
I would say that the most bigoted and superstitious religion in history is the current superficial religion of creativity of our educated elite. But what would I know?
I believe that an authentic creative culture would issue from an authentic creative religion. And that religion would echo the Jungian notion that the creative process exists on the borders of order and chaos and that usually the creative experience ends in disaster for the would-be creator and also for those associated with him. Thus a true religion of creativity would be drenched in the humility of that knowledge, that the true creative hero is a tragic hero, a sacrificial hero.
Now we travel into new territory.
It seems to me that the function of religion is to translate and transform our unconscious instincts into the conscious culture of a religion. Obviously -- or, at least, obvious to me -- the nature of that transformation will reflect the reality on the ground and the needs of the particular human community that the religion serves. The religion of a hunter-gatherer band will be different from the religion of an agricultural people will be different from the religion of a city people will be different from the religion of a creative educated elite. And this is right and proper.
Now I think -- from five minutes ago -- that the religion of a people tends to be specific and conscious, and its purpose is to set the parameters for the unconscious culture of that people.
Huh?
Well, I think that the purpose of religion is to reformulate and redirect the unconscious instincts of a human group to set its members up to inhabit a new world of unconscious instinct -- that we call culture -- adapted by some prophetic visioniary to suit the new world of the group and to train its members how to act in their everyday lives, by consciously putting on the new suit of the religion and thereafter unconsciously wearing that new suit in day-to-day life.
On this notion, politics would be the conscious expression of the culture in connection with the specific communal problems of the society, and specifically those questions that require the use of force, of which the major items are the defense of the community from enemies foreign and domestic.
The point is that normally the day-to-day culture of the people will resolve all problems, because people instinctively and unconsciously follow the unwritten rules of the culture. But those that do not respond to gentle persuastion need specific encouragement -- perhaps throught the use of force -- and problems that seem to be beyond the ability of the unconscious culture rise to consciousness in the rhetoric of politics to be dispatched by communal decision and executed by government force.
It seems to me that the actual operation of government is, again, a return to unconscious process. The fact is that government goes on in its dilatory way, in its various programs of government force, from the collection of taxes to the policing of criminals to the education of children, in another unconscious culture, where people are not really thinking about what is going down. People do not think about being forced to pay taxes or send their children to government school, but they pay their taxes and send their children to school. They obey the law without really thinking about it.
Only when the application of government force is experienced on the receiving end as injustice does it then rise to consciousness and into politics.
Now you can see why the Breitbart dictum about politics being downstream from culture is important. Because culture is an unconscious thing. It is what it is, and it does what it does. And one of the thing it does is set the agenda for politics by setting the unconscious agenda of what "everyone" accepts as day-to-day reality. So, if you don't like the way that politics frames the problems of society you now realize that to do that you have to change the culture.
But then, you understand, after John C. Wright, that to change the culture you need to change the religion.
And that is not a small thing.
As I say, the problem with the world at this time is that its educated elite has developed a false and malicious religion. Its religion of creativity is a religion of self-worship that basically says that everything that educated creative people do is good and anyone that disagrees with them is a racist sexist homophobe that should be named, shamed, ostracized, canceled, fired from their job. And think themselves lucky that they haven't been sent to the guillotine.
Now I think that we have all the knowledge we need to solve this problem. We have the psychology of Jung which explains how our conscious culture is necessarily entangled with our personal unconscious and with all the collective unconscious and its archetypes down the ages. We have Nietzsche telling us that creativity is a hard and lonely path, as his Zarathustra explained. We have the developmental psychologists from Piaget to Wilber that demonstrate how different people have different levels of consciousness and how only people inhabiting the higher levels can understand people at lower levels, and that people at lower levels think that people not at their level are either dumb idiots or crazy loons.
What we need is our creative class to understand that only a few people are ready for a religion of creativity. Most of the rest of us don't want to live creatively and wouldn't know how to anyway. So a True Religion of Creativity would start with the knowledge that the creative life is not for everyone.
And most important of all, the True Religion of Creativity would start with the advice of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Do you know what the advice was? There are variations, but it starts with advice to a young actress being bothered by the affections of older actors.
It doesn't make any difference what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."Interesting isn't it, that our liberal friends seem to have the opposite idea, that the whole point of a creative life is precisely to stampede the horses in the street and then shoot them for being too skittish.
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