The repercussions of our acts--the constructs we create--endure well past the dissolution of our convictions and desires. Our actions exist as living architecture that surrounds the breathing moment. Future generations will dwell in the world we erect, thought by thought, deed by deed."Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present." -- Albert Camus:
And what if we construct an architecture of evasion and deception?
What does such a place look like? If you live in the current day U.S., take a perusal around you.
Take in our culture's shoddily constructed, ugly, prefab, commercial structures--its archipelago of strip malls, fast food outlets, suburban, shitbox housing developments --gaudy mcmansion to cookie cutter trackhouse. Glance at its corporate state media, a self-perpetuating, self-referential dominion devoted to hype and hustle--a 24-7, enveloping sales pitch contrived to evoke the misplaced fear and manic compulsion required to create an unquestioning desire to consume ever proliferating arrays of unneeded, commercial products, as, all the while, its soul-defying criteria is internalized and the system's byproduct--climate chaos--roils land, sea and sky of our besieged planet.This is the world we have made. We tend to believe that our present day actions will pass into the shadow of memory, but they will remain in the world as ghostly architects of the future.
And this is where we stand, at present: We are transmigrating through a cultural landscape showing significant evidence of decline--a collective, psychical wasteland, defined by media mirages, political legerdemain, and ecological devastation. We find ourselves in an era in which arrogance and cupidity are enthroned while the veracities of the heart wander in the wilderness.
Presently, cunning is lauded as a virtue, yet steadfast compassion is viewed as weakness. Our ancestors would have regarded our predicament as catastrophic--a loss of soul" thus making it imperative that the gods be appeased--or else travail will follow travail.
We know these spurned and vengeful gods as alienation, as displaced rage, desperate anomie, as cultural atomization, inertia and decay.
The latest electronic gadget will not bring you balm; your guns will not preserve you; and it is evident the nation's political class will not assist us.
How does one avoid being drowned in dumbness?
An inner conviction--a deep-dwelling knowledge akin to grace exists within--when your opinion on a matter aligns with the realities at hand. Often, one must stand against rising currents of worldly, wrongheaded opinion--a cacophonous flood of stupid; a raging torrent of collective pathology.
This is when your own inner idiot and delusion-prone maniac can be of service to you. Ergo, you can think like your adversaries e.g., Smart can envisage Stupid and Crazy, but Stupid and Crazy cannot comprehend what is intelligent and sane.
Thus, as surging tides of stupid crash upon you, you can breathe, with amphibian-like mutability, in the rarefied air of wit and knowledge, and you can breathe, as well, when immersed beneath the floodwaters of surging stupid and inundating insanity.
There are times when a bauble-bedazzled idiot can serve as a role model, because he knows how to surrender to the joys of his heart. But, because you are not an idiot, there is no need to surrender to idiocy.
This evokes the question: What is it that I should give myself over to with idiotic abandon?
There is a vast difference between going supine before one's oppressors and surrendering to the vast, ineffable order of the heart of creation. The task is ongoing--and arduous, even, at times, terrifying.
It involves a drowning--a baptism of sorts, but of the poetic (not fundamentalist) variety-- a washing away of calcified habit and a rebirth by an immersion in the embracing waters of a larger order--one that is not defined by a compulsion for domination of the things of the world one cannot control.
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