Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

More important, when these assumptions of personal creation are extrapolated out of the individual realm and applied to society and politics (a philosophy which holds a napalmed baby responsible for having created its own reality is a political philosophy), then we have something dangerous on a systemic level. Power does not exist unless one decides that it does: oppression does not exist, politics do not exist, and neither does nature.

In this denial of everyday worldly reality, all realities become totally arbitrary, creating the perfect precondition for the imposition of any new "ground of reality" within the void. Though it may be nonsensical or fascistic, any reality is acceptable.

From 1984: "Anything could be true. The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense .... [The fallacy is to believe] that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our minds? All happenings are in the mind."

Whether it is Werner Erhard or Big Brother reconstructing the mind, it is true that once mental processes are disconnected from planetary sources, or concrete realities, then all validation of truth is impossible. Everything is acceptable. One constructs one's own truth. War is peace. Hate is love. Anything can begin to make sense but only within its own self-contained, unrooted bubble of logic. Once the bubble contacts the Earth, however, the logic evaporates. There is nothing arbitrary about the reality of an earthquake or the collision of cars or the loss of a job or the stabbing to death of one person by another. Nor is there anything arbitrary about one group of people subjugating another either through military or economic means. When such events happen, then they actually happen. They are outside human definition. Reality can become arbitrary only within the confines of a mental framework. People who live in direct contact with the planet itself are not concerned with any such questions.

The difference between Erhardian religions of the present moment and Indian or nature-based religions of other cultures or earlier times is that Erhard's is abstract. Its ideas depend upon their own unrootedness. Nature-based religions, including even Zen Buddhism, are concrete, involving direct observation, totally functional and integrated perceptual systems that "see" things as they are and experience life directly: person to planet, person to person, and person to self. When American Indian religions speak of responsibility, there is no question of responsibility to self as opposed to group. The one cannot be separated from the other.

Erhard-type movements are outgrowths of the wider alienation from source that I've been describing, which makes all things possible because nothing is grounded, definite and personally verifiable. These religions would remain mere curiosities or aberrations if they did not fit so neatly the technologically created arbitrary environments, but they are growing at a wild rate. As they grow, they turn further to the right, producing real monsters like Reverend Moon and others, no doubt, still to come. They reset the minds of millions of people to believe that all things are arbitrary and, since this is so, that nothing actually matters, and therefore nothing needs improving.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print