Monday, March 26, 2012

Spring is acumen in: Eves, and their Lambs.
The End Continued: Law as Crime (31)

© Eso A. B., 2012

Blog 30: An interesting reverberation on self-sacrifice( from China). Antiwar.com  refers to an AP article in the Washington Post, re “China Website Accuses Dalai Lama of ‘Nazi-Style’ Racial Policies, advocating 'Self-Immolation.'"


The author of this series of blogs has for some time advocated the view that any self-enclosed government system (without an exit clause, by way of, for example, direct democratic elections) is innately a fascist form of government, because in its heart of hearts it (a dried out pine cone), advocates a welfare system for its own members exclusively, and is exclusionary with regard to equality to all who are not members of the government body or are in some other way outside the ‘system’.

The Chinese government is obviously a system unto itself, which  Bo Xilai  may have recently attempted to reverse.

As for the U.S. government, here is Glenn Greenwald (interviewed by Amy Goodman): on the two tiered U.S. justice system and how the U.S. President Obama praises himself for engaging in anti-constitutional activities against U.S. citizens.

Alexis de Tocqueville”: “The American moralists do not profess that men ought to sacrifice themselves for their fellow creatures because it is noble to make such sacrifices, but they boldly aver that such sacrifices are as necessary to him who imposes them upon himself as to him for whose sake they are made. They have found out that, in their country and their age, man is brought home to himself by an irresistible force; and, losing all hope of stopping that force, they turn all their thoughts to the direction of it. They therefore do not deny that every man may follow his own interest, but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous.”

However, in light of my “Oedipus Rex Rewritten” it would appear—in retrospect of course—that de Tocqueville cast himself in the role of the overly anxious mother, queen Iocaste, of Oedipus, who refused to offer her son to the opinion of the Gods to test his character as worthy of that of a future king of Thebes (or China, or America, or Latvia, or whichever leader of whatever country). De Tocqueville committed the sin of optimism without allowing that unreflective positivism may result in tragedy (also shame) for an entire community.

* *  *

Some four and a half billion years ago, there began to appear the first signs of life  on Earth.


I believe that the birth of humankind should be thought of as beginning at this time, 4.5 billion years ago, because if there is such a thing as a divine spirit [to be thought less in terms of being a supernatural phenomenon as a mathematical concept, re: an Einsteinian constant  (=life?) floating in something we may call the Possible Unknowable (=the material void?], it entered Earth’s environment not today, but back then.


The Einsteinian constant did not enter life when the first human beings (Adam and Eve) appeared or when Jesus was born or sacrificed his life when pressed to do so, but with life itself. To defer creation to the time of Adam and Eve, screws up the arguments in favour of the materialists, because such a presumption cannot be called anything but “miracle mongering” accompanied by befuddling though contortions by any number of magicians.


One such contortionist of thought today is a Slovenian philosopher named Slavoy Žižek. Žižek is a smart guy and often right on target with his criticisms. Unfortunately, he cannot resist killing the bird, he holds in the cage, twice over. That is, while he is as correct as the child, who accuses the magician of having killed the bird (instead of making it magically disappear) in the bird cage, Žižek believes that the creative process (the divine spirit in dying) starts with him, rather than having begun 4.5 billion years ago. For Žižek, this enormously long period of evolutionary history, because it is unconscious and, oh! so cautious, does not meet his snap of the fingers criteria for miracles, i.e., “man (Žižek) is the cause of God” (p.33, TMOC). Maybe there is something to meditation after all—if it teaches how to overcome the sense of time and not fear no time or a billion years squeezed into a passing moment.


If divinity entered Earth’s environment with the beginnings of the first signs of life, then it leaves both the theists and atheists puzzed (?drowning in the Possible Unknowable) and without the ability to deliver a believable answer. This is not to deny that it took divinity a long time to manifest itself as a paranormal event (a story that manages to become an event)—when a human being first acts as if God or Gods exist on the basis of no other resources than one’s subjective mind.


There are thinkers, however, who deny that an entry of the divine spirit into human beings occurs with the arrival of life on Earth. I believe this view is mistaken, which mistake is supported by my ‘rewritten’ Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex Rewritten”. While I agree that the events surrounding the death of Jesus are unique, the uniqueness is not all that different from the ‘failed’ death of Oedipus (the story missing from the Freudian explanation), which, too—after all is said and done—arises out of the demand by a community of Thebes for a death by self-sacrifice, because it assures it of the Holy Ghost that will guarantee it its existence.


* * *


That my ‘rewrite’ should appear at this precise moment of history (1955-2012) necessarily asks if this is in response to a cry from within the community out of a yet unverbalized need. In other words, the theme hidden behind the words “The Wealth Virus” is that the continued existence of a community depends as much on the actualization of the act of self-sacrifice as it depends on the ‘holy ghost’ or charisma that exudes from the act and binds its witnesses through the regeneration of a 4.5 billion year old pact originally known as An Ode to Joy.

Will you tell what future awaits us?

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