The Realm Of Ideas

When I started this blog I was firmly fixated on the realm of ideas, which is to say I had my head firmly up my ass.

I believed, mistakenly, that ideas came from a deeper part of the self, from something not connected to the material world, a world of pure thought where I was quite convinced God might be found.

I spent so much time on deep meditation, past life regressions, reading the works of prophets and philosophers. I began to convince myself that there was such a thing as God manifesting through inspired music or writing, and I spun high-concept science fiction with an almost schizophrenic level of interconnectedness and symbolism.

Three things happened. First, Donald Trump got elected, and I was so excited about his downfall because I thought I was about to witness prophecies I made in a past life come true. That downfall never came; there was no divine intervention, and moreover the prophecy wasn’t even self-fulfilling since the kind of empty-headed gnostics who enjoyed that particular author’s work also were deep down conspiracy right rabbit holes and bumbled right into the kind of authoritarian rule he was trying to warn people about.

Second, I quit getting high every night and got on gabapentin, which stopped whatever runaway process was making me think I was remembering past lives and close to understanding God. I believe now that I may have suffered from some kind of temporal lobe lability, if not temporal lobe epilepsy.

Third, I gave Marx and Lenin a good read and finally wrapped my head around dialectical materialism.

Ideas don’t come ex nihilo. Jung, that favorite philosopher of scoundrels and charlatans, says that a bridge exists in the architect’s mind before it can be built; but what, I ask, makes him want to build bridges in the first place? The material conditions for that bridge to exist are the overarching fact of its existence. There had to be a physical gap for someone to say “there should be a bridge there.”

The same with fiction. There’s no fiction that comes from nothing. It all comes from the culture we absorb. You can stand on your head all day and try to impose Jungian archetypes or the Monomyth on non-western stories but you’re ultimately just pissing into the wind. Culture informs art and material reality informs culture. There’s no secret chaos dragon hiding in your bookcase.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as an idea so good and noble that it makes you a better person by following it. I realized that long ago when I saw pious but vapid Christians using ideology as cruise control for being a good person rather than making a real effort and thinking about their actions; exactly why I thought any other religion or philosophy would be better at changing the world by its very nature is beyond me. I made the same mistake twice. I guess maybe the weed turned my brain to mush?

Well, it’s not mush any more. It’s tempered by open eyes. And what my open eyes have seen is the sheer privilege I had when I was deeply invested in the realm of ideas instead of out there doing something.

Asceticism is bourgeois nonsense. It has always been the refuge of privileged people who can afford to ignore the real world.

I reject and denounce all asceticism as wasted time. I denounce religion as a silly distraction and a false consciousness against real-world problems. I denounce Carl Jung as an Ur-fascist. I denounce Stephan Hoeller as a reactionary monarchist and his church as a social club for feeble minds. I denounce the doctrine of reincarnation as a dangerous fantasy.

There. That’s a few bridges burned. I feel… I don’t know… relieved, I guess? I realize my words will have consequences. I just need to take that remaining sliver of myself that would crawl back to my old fantasies, that would apologize and toady to people and organizations I have since ceased contact with, and crush it under foot.