everyone's a think-tank
I dreamt I was in a chamber of a cave with three rivers coming into it and one going out. I went downstream and into other rooms where I saw people. They were looking for a way out and I told them it was back that way and to the left. It now seems clear the water flowing through the caves meant the irreversible flow of time, and the caves represent corporeality.In the following moment of the dream I was in a room facing a piano and discussing the human condition with a woman I work with.
I woke up thinking about this, so I figured I'd just put it on the blog and be done with it since it sort of, at least in my mind, ties back together, and I'd just as soon get my morning underway.
As far as I've bothered to think about it, it boils down to this.
The nature of every group of people is the success of each member's loyalty to that group. The group "country" depends on people's allegiance to it (hence a mandated pledge of allegiance). Because people are naturally probing enough to at least question the wisdom of total allegiance to something whose machinations eclipse their understanding, there are alternative allegiances, say to churches, in case the actions of government in the country's name defy the individual's sense of right and wrong. This, however, is the last stop on the intellectual choo-choo train for most Americans.
For all groups, the single greatest need is the interest of the individual, and each group uses a person's psyche against them in order to get their interest.
If I'm a group, I want a person to believe in how important I am. If I'm a communist group, I want to appeal to a person's sense of obligation to his fellow man. If I'm an environmentalist I want to appeal to a person's sense of responsibility to clean air and water. If I'm a church I'll appeal to a person's sense of right and wrong. In each of these cases, and every other one, the prize that is won is the "heart and mind" of the individual.
Simple tricks are used to get people all lined up. Most common, I think, is "the trotting out of the enemy". The enemy of the communist is the greed that leaves poor people to die while others get richer even as they recline fatly on sunny beaches. The enemy of the church (churches want people so intimately) is the vile abortionist, the enemy of the earth people is poison-belching industry. Some will pretend to have some interests in mind when obviously acting for others (in the United States, see the oil lobby's puppet government). Those are a little off the subject, though.
Through the actions of every group, by varying degrees, these ideas that exist in internal emails "in silico" move across some invisible barrier in the individual that we have yet to define, a task I am not up to, and become ideas "in vivo". That's what think thanks do, and what every other group does, has to do, to survive. It's make-believe all grown up, and when you see the word written, its implication becomes menacingly present. Let's just look at it for a moment. Make believe.
That barrier is what I spoke of with the lady in my dream. Some people realize that barrier is there, that wall with special doors into their minds, and some do not. I think that if there were a standard scale of what it is to understand the world (and why haven't we ever devoted some time to that), an excellent unit of measure would be whether an individual understands this --that the social world is a bunch of selves and groups acting as selves, all competing for the individual's interest and allegiance.
The most successful groups among civilized people appear to leave the most choices up to the individual, like the extremely flattering and dominant "capitalism", a method by which money moves through society.
Once a person has reached a certain level of intellectual maturity, he isn't bothered by attempts to jostle his attention into alignment with a certain group's needs. He has mapped the doors into his mind sufficiently to decide when to open them, and to make what I consider to be more responsible decisions. (My wife has a way in, and so do the members of my family, for example, and beer. Beer definitely has a way in there. I jest.)
About the room with the piano. That room represents the civilized world, and the degree to which a society is civilized is at least partially measurable by the conversations people have in it. Near the piano it's possible to reach out to another person and find in them their, and expose to them your own, helpless realization that the world is an essentially meaningless place full of noise, aural and visual, made of loud, obnoxious, self-ness. And only near the piano can the hope exist that someone will sit down to take your mind off it.
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