There is a lot of competition in the public arena (including the mass media and the discourse of major institutions - i.e. the linked-bureaucracy) about what should be the priority for what to do, what action to take...
All of them are wrong. Indeed, the more urgent and necessary the action you propose, the more it argues against any kind of campaign to rectify it. Of course, most of the priorities proposed are clearly insane - like the international multi-trillion dollar campaign to stop 'climate change' by reducing CO2 emissions.
But even the calls to address real and important problems fail to notice that the causal factor this is same insanity that led to the climate change scam.
For example, continued mass migration to the UK will destroy the nation, obviously: it is an excluse for totalitarianism, obviously - and especially when the mass immigration mostly comes from where it does, and includes the people it does.
But this is such obvious common sense that the causal factor cannot be that people don't realise the facts of the situation - it is that we have an insane population.
The more vital and urgent the action - the most clearly this fact demonstrates that the problem is deep, fundamental.
Insane, in the sense that the populations in the West have inverted priorities, based on inverted values (Good is evil; evil is Good). Now of course this situation has been led by the Establishment; but there is now little or no push-back. The masses are complicit, supportive of insanity, resistant to sanity...
Western populations are by-now deeply insane due to deep-rooted, foundational, metaphysical materialism/ positivism/ scientism... which means they/ we reject any possibility of meaning, purpose, objectivity.
Of course our societies are strategically insane - and many of the people who assume that they have seen-through the propaganda to the truth about this are equally insane at the deep level (they are merely insane about different things).
We must address the insanity first, because we cannot expect good results from implementing the understanding, priorities and methods of an insane population. All action plans are a distraction from that priority.
Think about it. Do you ask for advice about priorities and action-plans from someone who is talking to hallucinatory voices and who thinks they are Napolean? Or from somebody who believes that they are actually dead, their insides are rotted away and that they caused World War II? Or from somebody who gabbles rapid nonsese 24/7?... That is the modern Western population - just look at us, listen to us. Is it reasonable to expect discernment and strategy from people such as we are. here-and-now? No. The problem is the insanity. First the insanity must be cured; only after the insanity has gone, can we start taking notice.
Unless the casue of our prevalent insanity, the underlying problem of materialism, is addressed; then all actions will merely be the implementation of insanity.
This is a consequence of the corruption of all those who control and contribute to public discourse.
Don't be distracted.
What is sanity and what is insanity? It seems like a key question and one that is both fascinating and perplexing and somehow fundamentally central to the modern human beings situation. The insider thinks that he is sane, modern civilisation is sane and that the outsider insane, weird, defective, even dangerous? The outsider, in contrast, fears (or knows) he is somehow a more sane person living in an insane world and wants to cry 'wake up!' to the world but more often than not does not know what everyone should to wake up to and how. Most of these ideas come from my reflections on the Outsider by Colin Wilson, that I am currently reading.
ReplyDeleteIt seems fairly standard that the more tenacious and committed Outsider is to the cause of finding a solution to their existential problems, the more they will be driven to insanity thanks to their efforts: Neitzche, Van Goth, Hemingway, Lawrences 'mind suicide,' etc, etc, etc. It seems easy to imagine why the 'burgeois'masses do not wish to follow the distressing example of those that do seem compelled to be outsiders. The other relevant example that comes to mind is Pirsig, whom, as far as I can see explored the reality of madness more articulately and eloquently than most accounts I have ever read 'from the inside' (inside perspective) in ZAMM. He appears to have also become insane by 'seeing too far and too deep' with his surgically precise philosophical introspections. The resolution for him appears to have only occurred by decisively rejecting religious answers to the outsider problem and returning from the precipice of madness which is either a Kierkgaardian leap of faith (and the attendant abandonment of the concomitant restrictive metaphysics of materialism and rationalism) or else looking into the abyss and then turning away, going back to the comforting familiar bubble where at least things make sense relative to the madness within it. Why brings me back to insanity, does the genuine outsider or spiritual seeker need to go through this 'portal of madness' in order to become truely sane? If we examine the lives of many iconic religious figures and profits this certainly seems to be so and actually if they were to suddenly turn up in the modern world that is exactly what they would be labelled as and likely sectioned under the mental health act (assuming of course they were not able to use magic or miracles in order to compel their pychiatrists to re-examinr their own metaphysical assumptions by a direct dose of such severity that doubting Thomas himself would be converted in his assumptions, because at a minimum, a religious metaphysics absolutely requires a belief in the possibility of magic and the supernatural, which is one of the things the modern psychiatrist is absolutely certain cannot be real!
Second comment pending.
"Think about it. Do you ask for advice about priorities and action-plans from someone who is talking to hallucinatory voices and who thinks they are Napolean? Or from somebody who believes that they are actually dead, their insides are rotted away and that they caused World War II? Or from somebody who gabbles rapid nonsese 24/7?... That is the modern Western population - just look at us, listen to us. Is it reasonable to expect discernment and strategy from people such as we are. here-and-now? No. The problem is the insanity. First the insanity must be cured; only after the insanity has gone, can we start taking notice."
ReplyDeleteYes, those examples do seem obviously insane dont they?! But then, substituting a few elements here and there to that paragraph to illustrate the relative nature of madness, to see the flip-side of the coin if you will. Imagine this spoken by an atheistic, materialistic scientist, fed up with traditional religious nonsense, as they see it, a Dawkins or a Hitchins perhaps:
....someone who is talking to hallucinatory voices (conversing with advanced spiritual beings by channelling would certainly appear like this to an insider? Meeting the masters? A work of truth or the product of insanity?) and who thinks they are immortal and can talk to a resurrected being who lived as a man then died in the middle-east some two millenia ago? (Guess who?!) Or from somebody who believes that when actually dead, their immortal, indestructible, invisible and immaterial soul will be given a new body and will live again, forever, in a heaven designed by a supreme supernatural creator God who appears to his creations on mountain tops disguised as a burning tree? Or from somebody who gabbles rapid (apparent) nonsense in Church (perhaps 'speaking in tongues?' Again, a commonly accepted Christian belief) ... That is the modern backward Religious population - just look at them, listen to them. They are insane. First the insanity of religion must be cured; only after the insanity has gone, can we start making progress...
Forgive me for mangling your original post but I am sure you can see the point that I am trying to make. It feels like something worth exploring. Both of these paragraphs appear to describe a kind of face-value madness, unless a very particular road map for navigating an accepted view of reality is used, and the consistent element is a very different set of metaphysical assumptions that one is prepared to admit to evaluate reality. The religious person accepts first the possibility and then the assumed reality (most often without direct evidence but on faith) of providence, miracles and supernatural phenomenon. The madman may have a perculiar smorgasboard of metaphysical assumptions driven by pathological and often solipsist elements (such as your napoleon example) but the differences in what he or she has admitted to their reality is the result of spontaneously different or cultivated metaphysical assumptions. In essence, Madness would seem to be what 'the herd' or group consensus define as a departure from an acceptable set of metaphysical assumptions and the emergent picture of reality that follows from these collectively held assumptions. Operationally, you are mad when you disagree with these collective assumptions. This seems important because there also seems be an essential element of 'surrender' to what would commonly be considered a kind of madness when a new metaphysical assumption is embraced within the 'being' of human and only once that happens at a deep and integrated level can the reality of the person more precisely align with the universal divine reality. This seems to be a very big ask to all humans, without exception, starting where we are now. Talking about metaphysics intellectually is one thing and I suspect that may resonate with the philosophically inclined deep thinkers out there. But to ask a man to believe that he can walk on water (or even just that someone else did)?! Now that is a test of metaphysics through faith. The apostle Peter did it, with fear and trembling. Would most self-professed Christians really believe it to take that same step? And it is to that degree exactly that our faith in our metaphysics is tested and also it is the same marker of degree of insanity as judged by the recalcitrant insider and the struggling but frustrated outsider. Why brings me back to my original questions: What is sanity and what is insanity? Degrees of congruence with ultimate reality? Is appearing barking mad before the world the unavoidable bridge to spiritual progress?
ReplyDelete@David - Its the metaphysical assumptions, as always. The 'evidence' is always ambiguous, and can be interpreted in opposite directions. Insanity is only perceptible to those who have correct metaphysics - those with incoherent metaphysics cannot perceive it.
ReplyDelete@David - The essence of this post is not to argue for/ provide evidence for insanity (if someone cannot see it, there is no point in continuing the discussion).
ReplyDeleteBut to critique the understandable but misguided idea that the insane Western Civilization can take effective action to save itself *before* its insanity is cured.
Who, exactly, is going to decide on these actions? - except those same insane people whose insanity has led to the problems in the first place.
It is understandable that the rapidity of cultural destruction is assumed to mean that action to save the culture must be the first priority; but that is simply not possible.
A lot of the non-religious Right, and many of the religious Right, lack an appreciation of the depth and extent of the problem; or they would not suppose that government could cure it. A government composed-of/ elected-by insane people is going to produce insane policies - no matter what system of government is in place.
Yes, that sounds feasable. My remarks were typically tangential to the original post but something about it set me thinking that to the modern mind, accepting the metaphysical assumptions of Christianity is tantamount to an act of insanity and this is a significant stumbling block to faith in our times. Something that seems to need addressing if many intellectuals are to be able to re-evaluate their metaphysical assumptions.
DeleteOddly, as the late Michael Crichton observed, the environmental movement and its central obsession with climate change and its anthropogenic basis, are dogmatically asserted and accepted on faith, ironically operating like a replacement to a religion for many leftist, atheists of a green persuasion. I have always thought the climate change obsession likely to be invented to serve another agenda but that this conclusion is 'obvious' and 'common-sense' just is not the way that most people see it. Common sense is certainly not v common and to most people to deny climate change is man made is...insane and evil. Obviously.
@David - People very often say that Leftism/ Climate change/ political correctness etc are a replacement to religion - but they aren't! They are the *opposite* of religion. We need to be clear about this.
ReplyDelete