The Root Causes of Why We're FUBAR

Or “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”

I'm tempted to simply post:

“The U/S is FUBAR and the UK is heading the same way.

“That's it. That's the post.”

I was going to say that coming in the wake of Trump's abominable Big Ugly Bill, the message will be clear to all but the hardcore sycophants in Cult 45/47. However, large swathes of the population, especially in rural areas – ordinary, everyday, decent, law-abiding folk – are probably misinformed or oblivious to the facts.

But, of course, the spread of right-wing authoritarian regimes, faux-populism, faux-Christian nationalism, straight white male supremacy, oligarchy, and veiled eugenics sweeping through the US and reverberating throughout the West – toxic as these may be – have their root causes elsewhere. 

Though the allure of quick and simple solutions to horrendously complex problems is undeniable, and tempting, especially to those of us who have done our own research – that is, shunned the experts, the libtard fact-checkers and the Marxist wokerati, and watched a few videos on YouTube – we have to look deeper and further afield.

Widening the scope a little, we could say (as I've written elsewhere) that we are living through a Post-Enlightenment era of Post-Trust, Post-Truth, Post-Rationality, Post-Honour, and Post-Chivalry, along with the demise of nuance and sin of empathy, as screamed hour after hour at full volume from a thousand social media posts in conservative and liberal echo chambers, witnessed in a growing number of mass street protests, and seen in the looming shadow of the fascist police state and the rise of techno-feudalist despotism.

If only all these “WTF!”s, “Aha!”s, “LOL”s and “Gotcha!”s in the social media were votes, and voting was fair. And if only, once elected, all politicians of all parties freed themselves of partisan tendencies and vested interests and actually fairly represented the people, regardless of their politics, religion, race, gender, vulnerability or disability. If only.

It's perfectly understandable why people no longer trust institutions, authority figures or the elite, even distrust science, and why they should feel neglected, abandoned, frustrated, and angry, seek alternatives to the dysfunctional status quo, and not realise that they have been played by misguided or unscrupulous agents intent on sowing division, chaos, and even deliberate societal dysfunction and collapse.

Root Causes

But as I say, toxic as these sociopolitical issues may be – and that would also include the climate emergency and the decimation of biodiversity – they have their root causes elsewhere.

We're between worlds right now, in what some call late-stage capitalism, and the materialist worldview is also waning, caught in a period of necessary death and possible rebirth, both of which can be painful and traumatic.

According to the philosopher, linguist and poet Jean Gebser, there have been four structures of consciousness so far, what he calls “the archaic,” “the magical,” “the mythic,” and “the mental-rational”, ranging from our prehistoric ancestors to modern times. We are now in the late-stage (left-brain), deficient mode of the mental-rational structure of consciousness, and things are going wrong and breaking down. There’s a slim chance that we may transition into a fifth structure, the integral, but there are bound to be many necessary and unfortunate upheavals, and many tears. And, contrary to what many conservatives might have us believe, there is no quick fix and no turning the clock back to some supposedly golden age in our national histories that probably did not exist.

Disenchantment

Others speak of disenchantment. Richard Tarnas, quoted in Jeremy D. Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness, for example writes:

“By the late modern period, the cosmos has metamorphosed into a mindless, soulless vacuum, within which the human being is incongruently self-aware. The Anima Mundi [the Soul of the World] has dissolved and disappeared, and all psychological and spiritual qualities are now located exclusively in the human mind and psyche.

“The forging of the self and the disenchantment of the world, the differentiation of the human and the appropriation of meaning, are all aspects of the same development. In effect, to sum up a very complex process, the achievement of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation.”

Eugene McCarraher writes in The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity: “The Romantic antipathy to capitalism, mechanization, and disenchantment stemmed not from a facile and nostalgic desire to return to the past, but from a view that much of what passed for ‘progress’ was in fact inimical to human flourishing: a specious productivity that required the acceptance of venality, injustice, and despoliation; a technological and organizational efficiency that entailed the industrialization of human beings; and the primacy of the production of goods over the cultivation and nurturance of men and women. This train of iniquities followed inevitably from the chauvinism of what William Blake called ‘single vision,’ a blindness to the enormity of reality that led to a ‘Babylon builded in the waste.’

“Romantics redefined rather than rejected ‘realism’ and ‘progress,’ drawing on the premodern customs and traditions of peasants, artisans, and artists: craftsmanship, mutual aid, and a conception of property that harkened back to the medieval practices of ‘the commons.’”

Beyond Appeals to Reason

I could go on at length (and have done so elsewhere), but such is the mesmerising and soporific hold that the mechanistic materialist and capitalist worldview and social conditioning have over us, and such are the limitations of reason, no amount of argument would make more than a superficial and short-lived impression in the sand before being washed away, if we even deigned to consider such outlandish notions in the first place – even the absurd notion that there might be viable and benevolent alternatives. Instead, what is called for is a lengthy immersion in materials that present alternative worldviews, lifestyles or arts, as a preliminary substitute for direct experience, and in the hope that something will eventually “click”, and that “when the penny drops” – inoculated, if you like – we see this world in a whole new light.

As Edward Bilous writes in Moonlit Path: Reflections on the Dark Feminine, edited by Fred Gustafson: “There is a psychological and spiritual dimension to our world that cannot be understood through reason alone, but needs to be experienced directly through feelings, dreams, and intuitions. This larger reality is woven through our lives like the subtext of a great play. Once we become attentive to it, even the simplest of acts resonates with a greater sense of purpose and the smallest object becomes a metaphor for the world.”

And as Coleman Barks has Rumi assure us: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.”

I look forward to meeting you there, dear friends.

Follow the Breadcrumbs

I've left a trail of breadcrumbs in works I've published, and you can find them at the Internet Archive's library, and at the Facebook group Mystical Faction, in the Files section.

Note

If you'll excuse the vernacular, FUBAR is an abbreviation that stands for F**ked Up Beyond All Repair (or Recognition). As for the U/S, the once-United States now stand divided both internally and internationally.

Image

Imprisoned Soul (22548690218) / pedro alves from S. Domingos de Rana, Portugal / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Flickr) / CC BY 2.0.