Once upon a time, Homo sapiens were infinitely more self directed and autonomous than they (we) are now. For example, prior to millennia of social conditioning, the cave paintings in France (and elsewhere) which go back around 30,000 years, exhibit a unity with nature and spontaneity (same thing) that pre date the very un creative robots human beings have been cumulatively programmed into.
This was pre-institutional religion and politics (a true heaven on Earth). However, as the centuries and millennia ticked on, the "human race" became ever more conditioned and their "memory banks" became gorged with symbols and language.
Language certainly is a magnificent tool, but too much of a good thing is like too much salt in the stew and most human beings now equate reality itself with how we simplistically think about it. In the orient, this is known as "maya" and is considered to be the essence of delusion. The thinking about point of view becomes, in turn, the essence of ego/personality which generates all the toxic dualities of human existence, e.g., the so called "external world" vs. the so called "separate self" -- a conceptual duality only, since one wonders where "you" are when you're a duality away from reality. This is called losing touch with reality = insanity.
A western take on "consensus reality" (maya) is Sigmund Freud's Super Ego. His trinity of Ego, Id, and Super Ego still have much clarifying power and they are brilliantly articulated in his "Civilization and its Discontents", written near the end of his life.
"Discontents" indeed! How about watching the neo-Nazi Bush/Republicans annihilate not only American civilization, but ultimately the entire human adventure.
The big picture here is that there's always been a kind of psychological/philosophical "fresh air" in the politics of liberalism, which is another way of saying progressives are more grounded in reality/nature than fascist abstraction machines. Fascists always have their Goals (written in Gothic German script) and agendas. They play nothing by ear or feel since they are terrified of getting too close to nature (as in natural human impulses).
Spiritually put, Republicans have been robotized into symbolic goose stepping androids. Even barnyard animals can sense that they're incredibly sexually repressed (terror of nature) and their lust for fossil fuels is raping Mother Nature (note the feminine image) with a vengeance. Indeed, one senses that fascist/Nazi types actually HATE nature and, like brain dead Christian religious fundamentalists, they are always trying to obliterate it (Armageddon comes to mind -- the Baptist Big Bang). This goes back to the Old Testament, that astoundingly patriarchal cataclysm of contempt for the feminine (remember Lilith!). Indeed, for the ancient Roman Christians, the very work "pagan" meant country dweller and the evil feminine was restricted to Hebrew mountain tops.
This all full circles back to the present in many ways. The most relevant and poisonous example of this conditioning/programming is the Have and Have Not distinction. The incredible fact that roughly 0.5% of the human race (the vampire elites) have been the God's of this planet for at least the last 6,000 years is an agonizing example of the power of institutional conditioning. The Greek God like elites haven't reduced the rest of the human race to obedient cattle because of their power and cleverness, but because we have been conditioned ("brainwashed") into thinking that the Have and Have Not distinction is somehow appropriate and "just the way things are". In short, it's simply the hand that life has dealt us, like our gender and the size of the moon.
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