One of the themes that goes back to the start of this blog is that demotivation is a profound problem in modern Western civilization; and that this relates to our alienation - our lack of participation in the world outside of our-selves.
To this could be allied a feeling of lacking energy, which is partly a consequence of lacking strong motivation.
However, the methods by which a depleted and demotivated person can attain greater vitality and purpose have their hazards - because most of these either increase our dependence on external sources, rendering us open to manipulation; and/or they have a tendency to narrow and harden the whole person.
This trned has been culturally observable for many centuries or millennia, if one is open to the possibility; the conquering Roman and Normans discovered strong energy and purpose via a culture based on architecture and legalism.
But there were significant human costs, or rather de-humanizing, anti-spiritual costs; whereby religion became more concentrated and single-pointed - more like a magic system of achieving willed objectives, and thereby became more alienating and isolating from relationships with God, the world of spirit, and indeed relationships with other people at a profound level.
This is seen nowadays in the prevalent Careerism of the ruling classes, combined with intrinsically-invasive bureaucracy - and their consequent extreme hardness, narrowness, materialism, greed; and a dependence on external direction that is both habitual and ideological.
My point is that there are short-medium term and effective methods of achieving purpose and a kind of meaning in life; that are profoundly dehumanizing in the long term.
These amount to their adherents incrementally painting themselves into a corner of emptiness, desperation, and despair; from which they can only escape by annihilation of self-awareness, and ultimately willed self-destruction.
This extremely brittle form of adaptation to life then forms the basis for that de facto embrace of spitefulness and induced chaos as a crude and negative reaction against the narrowing and hardening which caused the situation in the first place.
My point here is that the "will-power"-driven careerism - narrowing and hardenening of personality and institutional policy; the linkage of energy, will and direction to external authority; are very powerful on their own ground.
Those who desire to resist and oppose the dehumanizing and alienating tendency of our civilization are therefore doomed to fail if they meet the Romans, Normans, or their successors on their own ground.
Their own ground includes the primacy of legalistic thinking, bureaucracy - including its assumptions of virtue as including obedience to external (invariably systemic) authority.
An ancient example of this fatal self-weakening is my interpretation of why the more creative and mystical Anglo-Saxon "Celtic" Christianity (from Ireland via Iona and Lindisfarne) was overcome by the later Roman mission initiated by St Augustine of Canterbury and St Wilfrid (variously Abbot of Ripon, Bishop of Hexham, Archbishop of Canterbury) - at the Synod of Whitby.
Celtic capacity for resistance to Roman takeover was fatally undermined and weakened because the Celtic church shared the fundamental bureaucratic and legalistic assumptions - the structured hierarchy rooted in obedience - of the Roman Church - and the Romans did bureaucracy much, much better than the Celts!
Apparently the debate was won by the gelaitstic argument of forcing the Celts to agree that the Pope of Rome was the ultimate Christian authority, and that "therefore" all Christians must obey everything that the Pope (via his representative Wilfred) told them to do.
I would link the Roman, and later Norman, triumphs to their architecture, to their stone temples/ monasteries, cathedrals, and churches - as well as their stone forts and castles.
The very structure of these stone buildings, plus the highly formal and single-pointed-purpose rituals enacted within them; was a cause as well as an effect of the narrower and more concentrated form of cosnciousness that began its long and to triumphant march to domination in The West.
Such combination of authority and obedience, systemic organization, buildings, and rituals; constitute a kind of magical activity (a method, a science indeed, for focusing conscious will power to affect people's consciousness, and shape the world) that continues, and it continues to be effective, even now.
This magical system of domination is not essentially Christian, and has indeed become anti-Christian. But its domination will continue - including among Christians - for as long as those who oppose it in their hearts, continue to share its assumptions in their heads, and by habit and expediency.
"We" cannot stop or defeat "Them" so long as we meet Them on their own ground of systemic discourse (politics, government, law, mass media, etc); and so long as We defer to Their core assumptions regarding the ultimate value and rightness of external authority.
Unless we rid ourselves of these ultimate assumptions as to what is proper and right, and replace them with other and more powerful, motivating assumptions; We shall succumb to Their will...
We shall continue to be overcome by Their narrow and concentrated spiritual-magic, as much or more than by their material power.
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