Wednesday 3 July 2024

A civilization that has turned against itself

 I find very little awareness of the profundity of shift in our civilization. A civilization renews itself across generations, but ours seeks its own annihilation.

This is just a fact, and quite explicit in detail. In every field or domain, subversion and inversion are most valued. 

There was, in all civilizations, a handing on and preservation of the meaning and importance of symbols whether in poetry, or science, or anything. Symbols carried the civilization through time, and the symbols linked back though the middle ages to Roman, to Greek civilization and beyond - for good and for ill, but that was the way it worked.

At some point the symbols began losing their objective nature. We were no longer sustained by the objectivity of the symbol. The symbol did not impose itself upon us...

What then happened, which was an evil thing - motivated against the divine - was that symbol was replaced by bureaucracy. Instead of continuity by objective symbol, continuity became organizational - from the overlapping personnel and procedures of system.

Now, "objectivity" comes from bureaucracy, and the actual bureaucracy works to subvert/invert the symbolism linking us to the past - and thereby remove a rival to its power and domination.

This is why poetry, science, music, farming, law, crafts, patriotism, religion... have all declined or collapsed: they are all symbols actively being killed by bureaucracy.

We no longer inhabit a civilization but a bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy is primary; because it redefines and deletes symbols at will, in order to weaken and destroy them.

In order to destroy creation, and thereby deny and replace creation.



3 comments:

Hamish McCallum said...

Indeed; and bureaucracy kills - really kills - the spirit within anything it touches.

Seeing this happen in areas I knew well made it easy for me to accept the notion of Ahrimanic evil.

Bruce Charlton said...

@HM - I first realized this in science, when so called peer review/ consensus ( ie bureaucratic decision) became the bottom line validity for "truth" - as a determinant of grants/ publishing/ hiring/ promotions/ prestige/ prizes/ authority.

Mia said...

Yes, I've struggled to navigate this reality as our family wants to attend church, but even when we can overcome doctrinal issues or litmus tests or other types of wrongness, there is this hideous underlying wrongness stemming from a sickening drive to feed bureaucracy before the flock. I find it's a non-starter to even call attention to this tendency let alone correct it because it's equated with goodness, rightness, and morality in everyone in leadership's minds. Like the safety cult mentality, it's "just the responsible thing to do." Individuals in the flock may roll their eyes at it, but no one with any say is genuinely able to question it or see the evil of it.