After World War II, anthropologists discovered primitive groups that had been entirely static and had never "entered" history. Their belief systems were entirely structured around various benevolent and malevolent tribal spirits. Upon noticing American soldiers and their boats loaded down with riches that were distributed to the population, they did not alter their basic conception of reality. Rather, they simply incorporated the American G.I.s into a "cargo cult," and gave their old gods a new identity. Time and change were successfully warded off.
On the bottom floor of the primitve group psyche there is an abiding sense that time is not progressive. Rather, time is the enemy. It does not advance, but wears away and corrodes. Things that unexpectedly develop in time, like, say, President Bush, the conservative movement, or the threat of Islamic terrorism, are not exactly denied. Rather, they are regarded as bizarre aberrations -- they are not really real.
For the progressive, their reality has been stolen and a false one has been inserted. I mean this literally, for example, with regard to the ineradicable obsession with the 2000 election. It is not so much that an election was "stolen." Rather, the feeling is that their beautiful reality has been purloined. But this is just a small reflection of the more pervasive sentiment in the dead and dying liberal MSM that reality went off the rails in approximately 1980, with the ascendancy of Reaganism. It is as if they are constantly trying to undo that tragic mistake and force reality back into the little liberal box that once contained it (and them).
In order to deny the corrosive effect of time and change, primitive groups enact rituals to reassert the original divine order. This is why you can see that the left is so astonishingly ritualistic in their thinking. For their philosophy, like any religious philosophy, revolves around certain iconographic symbols that abide outside time. They are "forever." They need only be evoked, like magical incantations, and we are back in the comfortable tribal delusions of the 1960's: "War is not the answer." "America is a racist, sexist, homophobic country." "Culture of corruption." "Tax cuts for the rich." "Be Very Afraid, the world is cooling/warming." "Global Orgasm for Peace." This is the otherwise inexplicable appeal of that cliche-ridden empty suit, Barack Obama.
Like the Islamists, the "progressive" is animated by a beautiful ideal located in the distant past. In truth, it never really existed. Rather, it is purely archetypal and precedes any particular "thoughts" about it. Once it is embraced, it then produces its own thoughts. The formality of a thinker is not required. If you peruse, say, huffingtonpost or dailykos, you will see that the memes that are reflexively channelled there are overwhelmingly angry, paranoid, and alarmist. In reality, this represents alarm over the fact that time really does exist, and rage at the fact that the wider world does not mirror their tribal ideal.
The progressive party is the nostalgic party that actually wishes to deny history and escape from time. Perhaps I should again emphasize how common this is, both in individuals and in groups. Freud, for example, said that the neurotic "suffers from reminisences." For what is a neurosis but a perpetual replaying of events of the past that are superimposed on the present, the constant structuring of reality in terms of the timeless unconscious?
Similarly, the progressive navigates through life while keeping his eyes riveted on the rear view mirror. Therefore, the same things keep mysteriously happening. It's positively eery: Bush
is Nixon. Iraq
is Vietnam. The terrorist intercept program
is the White House enemy list. The Valerie Plame matter
is Watergate. Clearly, these progressive cargo-cultists think that all the economic gifts brought to us by those two tax-cutting bwanas, Reagan and Bush, really arrived courtesy of the old big government gods.
The archaic community lives in a tribal memory that is impervious to the ravages of time. But as reality increasingly deviates from the sacred memory, it is the duty of every tribal member to renew, reassert and rejuvenate the ideal through rituals of various kinds. You can see these primitive magicians at dailykos, going through their various rituals and Ghost Dances, raging against reality, desperately trying to cleanse and "renew" it.
For primitive groups, time is terror. Therefore, it is no surprise that we routinely hear from the left that "George Bush is the world's biggest terrorist." That he is, in the sense that he has no respect for the tribal ways of the progressive mind and its sacred, eternal myths.
In the long run, in most merely quantitative ways, things always get better, as science and capitalism -- not progressivism -- assure that. The economy is humming along with low unemployment and interest rates, people are living longer than ever, the environment has never been cleaner in my lifetime, crime rates and illegitimacy are much lower than the recent past, more people own homes and attend college than ever. These are all the things progressives supposedly care about, but the better things get, the worse they feel.
But things are also changing in qualitative ways: materialism and spiritual exhaustion, neopaganism, barbarous entertainment, cognitively repressive political correctness, the cult of the body, sexual license, self-worship, moral relativism, multi-culturalism... Why aren't progressives more grateful? Still not primitive enough?
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/...-denial-of.html
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02-12-2006, 17:08
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