Help me to understand what I am doing in this world. Every day I find good people to meet and good things to do and I wonder, does it add up to anything?
There is always the possibility that I could begin to believe in something, though this seems to be a far-fetched prospect. I don't know how this believing in things business is done; no one can give me a straight answer, as if they don't know or aren't willing to face the truth. Perhaps the truth is that they practice what George Orwell called double-think and they actually don't believe what they believe at all, but they do believe in it simultaneously. This idea makes more sense than the one that suggests the world is full of stupid believers rather than beautiful lovers. My experience of the people in this world, once the veil of abnormality is removed, is that they really are beautiful lovers rather than stupid believers. Try it for yourself, it's real, it's scientific, it's repeatable, meet another person face-to-face with openness and honesty and acceptance and love and you will discover that essentially they do not believe in anything, they are beautiful and they are present; they are your lover and you could even say they are you, though we don't want to be metaphorical because that is only one step away from metaphysical which is too many steps away from science, which is the truth.
No, I'm being ironic now, I don't believe in science any more than I don't believe in original sin. They're both human concepts that neither exist nor don't exist. Of course one concept is considerably more useful than the other, but who am I to judge really, I am merely a thinker and a poet. I have no legitimate or official authority handed down to me via a higher authority. All I have is the integrity of being a living being, given life by God herself, birthed from the Gaian womb for 99 years of life on this planet before I too will rot back into the earth like everything else. My authority is neither perpetual or omnipotent.
Some people claim some sort of official omnipotence. They know they are as powerless as their children though they would never admit it to themselves, let alone someone they trust or the world they fear. These people believe in their omnipotence because they think that the dominant ideology that legitimises national givernments and their gun-wielding agents is a universal ideology and that anyone who doesn't agree is wrong or at least insane or at least criminal or at least unpopular. Their omnipotence is reinforced with law, with involuntary taxes, with professional gangs trained in systematic violence and intimidation and with a globe divided via national borders. Yes, the planet, the largest physical object we can be certain we control, is defined and divided by which national government owns what, and every piece of land is owned by some government. Even Antarctica is claimed as national territory by a number of governments, though it is uninhabitable. I can only assume these omnipotence-delusional control-freaks are simultaneously aware of their powerlessness; surely, because they understand the convoluted mechanisms of politics.
Perhaps the beautiful loved-filled human being who is reading this thinks they believe in something. Maybe they casually believe in something useful or maybe they definitely believe in some religion they must guiltily defend. Maybe the more aware they are of the mental mechanism of double-think the more forcefully they must make a display of the absolute nature of the linguistic construct they use to define them as a person.
What if they could be honest? (What if you could be honest?) What if they could acknowledge that their religion, whether it be Islam, Mormonism or Consumer Democracy, is not true or untrue, that it is a beautiful useful myth for them, that it is so powerful already that it doesn't need to be defended, that its integrity is such that it is actually strengthened by the proximity of alternative myths, that although this myth preceded and will survive humanity our understanding of it can be enriched and complexified by open-minded discourse and diversity and therefore the truth is not under threat.
Just quietly, who but a person practicing double-think would feel the need to defend their ideology? It is the same as a person or society full of fear feeling the need to defend their territory, rather than someone supported by confidence and strength.
I don't know what I am trying to say. I don't believe in anything, yet I feel the need to write every day. If you have discovered something worthy of my belief, please let me know immediately. Look at the corner we've painted ourselves into, I don't see anything to believe in. I just hope to have enough boots to be able to change them.
2011-02-19
I don't see anything to believe in
Abstract connections:
belief systems,
Bob Dylan,
double-think,
nationalism,
politics,
religion
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