How Meaning of Life, Religion, Culture and Politics Connect

We all know the basic truth of humans as social animals. It is the notion of Downstream-ism, that

Politics is downstream from culture, is downstream from religion, is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

But why? I was writing about downstream-ism yesterday in "What if Wokism is Implied in the Civil Rights Laws," but after I finished it came to me, in a vision, how the four things -- politics, culture, religion, and the meaning of life -- are connected. So here goes.

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the vision of eternity. Of course, it is way short of the real meaning of life, the universe, and everything. I maintain that the more we know the more we know we don't know. Think of the simplicity of the universe of The Iliad that was just humans and the gods on Mt. Olympus. Or the geocentric model of the universe. Or explaining everything with spirits in the trees, or God creating the universe in six days and then deciding everything. Now we believe that the "observable" universe is huge, about 100 billion light years across. But really, we still don't have a clue.

The point is that at every stage in the story of human existence we seem to need a story of what the universe is and how it got there and what it all means to us. I wonder why?

Religion is the vision of eternity reduced to a system. That's what Moses did when he came down from Mt. Sinai. He reduced the divine vision he had experienced to the Ten Commandments. The vision of Jesus Christ was reduced by St. Peter and St. Paul to the systematic religion we call Christianity. The vision of Marx was reduced to the religious system we call Marxism. The vision of the Frankfurt School was reduced into the religious system we call Wokism, and woke priests are teaching it in the schools as Critical Race Theory.

Religion is inevitable. Most people live their daily lives; they have no time for visions in the wilderness or Nietzschean Thus Spake Zarathustras. So they experience the vision reduced into the processed food of church services on Sunday or mostly peaceful protests downtown.

Culture is the religious system turned into a true story. It is all about people living their lives according to the vision of eternity as promulgated into systematic religion. It is responding to our human need to see the world in human rather than systematic terms, and it is responding to the human need to experience and remember everything in a story, a narrative, and to see what happens to people if they go with the system. But what happens if they rebel against the vision turned into a system. Nothing good, needless to say. Obviously the story that Homer told in The Iliad is different from the story that John Bunyan told in Pilgrim's Progress is different that the story told by women novelists in the 19th century is different from the story told by James Joyce in Ulysses is different from the story told in the 20th century in 1950s TV sitcoms or by Eve Ensler in The Vagina Monologues.

Domestic politics is the religious system's true story reduced to enforcement by a ruling class. Enforcement is only experienced by those on the receiving end. To the rulers, politics is just good people doing God's work. It only makes sense that, when the rubber hits the road, something must be done about people that don't get with the program of the ruling class's vision of eternity, their well-thought-out religious system, and their morally improving tales. And of course, the foot-soldiers that get with the ruling-class's program need to be rewarded with loot and plunder.

International politics -- war -- is the defense of the religious system's true story against foreigners. That'll teach 'em!

Now you can understand America under the rule of the woke. The vision of eternity is the idea of perfect equality here on Earth, the lion lying down with the lamb: all races, all genders, all workers, all activists, all billionaires. The religion is the commandments on the yard signs: Black Lives Matter, Love is Love, Kindness is Everything. The culture is the multiracial advertisements, the superhero heroines, the wise black grandfathers, the husbands as idiots, the businessmen as villains. The politics is the allies protecting the oppressed peoples from the white oppressors and mandating the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools.

Got it?