Think about it. In the old days we at least had the comfortable faith that the gods knew what they were about. Then with the Axial Age religions we have the knowledge that God had created the world and it was good. Now that we have got into the Creation game ourselves we should be terrified. Plato wrote in the Phaedrus that the difference between gods and men is that the gods have two good horses pulling their chariots, but we men have only one good horse; we must spend our lives wrestling with the bad horse, and thus have no time to look upwards towards the Platonic Ideas in the empyrean. We humans are not gods; we are mortal men and women that really don’t have a clue; we spend our lives trying to keep the bad horse under control. For all our modern revolution in knowledge we still have no idea about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." And what do we do? We make it up.
And yet, our lefty friends have a plan to save the world, because we are destroying the climate. I wonder why? I remind you:
The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]
If the climate is heating up at one degree-ish per century, this must be a personal fault of capitalism, and the sacrifice of the Commoners to the climate gods may be the only way to prevent the best people from dying.
And if there is hunger and poverty and oppression and inequality -- and blacks in America still haven't caught up with whites -- this must be the fault or the malevolence of the racist-sexist-homophobes. Because there must be a fault.
And the answer to these faults is Jobs for Gentry, tuning up huge computer models and manufacturing gigantic bureaucratic engines to save the human race from its suffering. Because there must be an answer.
I don’t think so.
But what is the answer?
The answer starts with the notion that the meaning of life for the Creative must be the journey of the Sacrificial Hero, a terrifying journey into the underworld of the unconscious, and not the Ego Hero, the simplistic ethos of the "ally" bravely advocating for the "oppressed peoples" suffering under the domination and exploitation of the "white oppressors."
The new world that is to come begins with the discovery of a new meaning of life by the Sacrificial Hero on the border between Order and Chaos. Then it is up to the prophets to prophesy new religions. Then it is up to the writers and artists and thinkers to imagine new cultures. Then it is time for politicians to teach a new generation of people how he cares about people like them, and for Anybodies to create the next technological revolution.
And that is a very big project.
But at least we start with the knowledge gained from all the monstrous mistakes of the last century and more. More than ever before we know what doesn’t work. I call these mistakes, the century-long lurch towards colossal error, the Great Reaction, where socialism is a return to slavery, the welfare state is a return to feudalism, identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a fantasy of revolution, gentry kids putting on a school play for their professors; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; social justice is good old loot and plunder. You could call it a lurch back to primitivism -- by the most sophisticated. And given that the epitome of primitivism is vengeance you can hardly be surprised to see that the whole agenda of the left is very close to vengeance in the grand old primitive style. I have written a bit about this vengeance culture here.
I have written also about the errors of the left, the stupidities of people that think they have the answer for everyone, and the crimes of the left, where an actual butcher's bill resulted from a lefty error. It all adds up to a Wrong Turn.
Really, you can’t blame the Gentry creatives for their foolishness. They are just falling into the old archetypes, the primitive beliefs of our primitive ancestors, yet lacking the knowledge, the experience, the wisdom to adapt them for the post hunter-gatherer, post agricultural, post-industrial world. What they should be thinking about is how to extend the patient process of replacing war with sports, duels with debates, gossip with book clubs, and activism with…
Yes, how exactly are we going to domesticate les activistes? Any suggestions?
Years ago I thought that it would take generations to work all this out. But then I thought that if a guy like me, that had read a few books, could see the blurry outline of the problem and the glimmerings of an answer then probably brighter lights had already solved the problems. Only their lights were still emerging from under a bushel. So now I have a faith that the prophets are already born, the writers are already writing, and the politicians are already rehearsing their sound bites.
If I can imagine a blurred “vision of the good life” through a glass darkly, surely the geniuses have already seen the new peaks rising vividly before them, face to face.
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