The Cancer of Fear.
I'm just recently back from a weekend in England. The place is turning gradually into a Police state, or that is what the warnings about not neglecting your bags and reporting anything suspicious leads me to feel. It’s certainly not yet, however, anything like the scenes depicted in the recent film, “Children of Men”, thank God. While I can accept any degree of paranoid surveillance would retrospectively be justified if it prevented mass murder, I really do wonder how such a tension could securely insulate us from such danger, especially in the light of the martyr’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his dark art. In the meantime, this paranoia, while not guaranteeing safety anyway, cancerously eats out the heart of the very freedom our powers-that-be aspire to protect.
One of the principal roles for the state, beyond administering justice to restrain our vigilante blood-lusts, is to defend us from fear. Not only, then, to defend us from those who wish to hurt us, but to defend us from the fear of being attacked or blown up at any minute by emotional retards. Isn’t this why we voluntarily (for voluntary is what tax is –unless we live in a dictatorship) give the Government money to run those things called the police and the military? Are we sure that booming out dread and suspiciousness of our neighbour is entirely called for? Isn’t it the responsibility of those we pay to protect us to worry about the forces of death and incivility? Or is it that we are expected to help out, and share in the burden? But wouldn't that mean we are entitled to a rebate on our tax? Doesn’t this mean we are doing the Government's job for free?
We know we cannot live in a perfectly secure world. We’ve known this since we first stubbed our toes and cut ourselves and found that mother’s power could neither always protect us from these inconveniences, nor effortlessly dispel the attendant pain. So what is new, then, about thinking we might be blown up at any minute? We lived like that during the War and then for 40 years during the Cold War, but levity and innocence nonetheless survived. The chances today of course are very much that the vast majority of us, if not all of us, will not be blown up, especially if the security services are doing their job as well as one hopes and presumes they are. So why should we live in fear? This itself constitutes not so much ‘defeat’ (I eschew this ridiculously Zoroastrian talk of a war on an abstract noun - Terror); what it constitutes is Cowardice, that old chestnut of a vice which in these stuporific days has gone the way of many of the other vices and all the noble virtues - into the rancid soup of post-modern victimhood - which we quaff greedily, whilst sucking, uncertainly, on the consoling nipple of the void.
An important question to raise is whether it is the Governments of the World’s intention to actually make us frightened; not to protect us from an external enemy, but to make us the more easily controllable. One might, but needn’t, believe that the CIA brought down the Twin Towers deliberately in order to suspect this. The Marxist critique that religion is the invention of the masters to keep the slaves opiated into docile subservience - does this belief live on in an age wherein, faced with God’s shyness, if not his definitive non-existence, the masters can no longer rely on theologies and the eloquence of their priests to keep knees on the floor conveniently? Now, in the spirit of Orwell’s 1984, is it that fear as an end in-itself is now to be paraded nakedly. Is fear itself to become our new God?
Actually, while not denying that it is probable that some degree of dark intentionality indeed stalks the corridors of power, I am loathe, and desire to be loathe, to accept that the Al-Qaeda threat is a mere mirage conjured by dark cabals who want us to remain bricks in their walls, insulating and preserving their dominance over us. Do I think this, I wonder, only because my Grandfather was a Bishop and my other Grandfather an MD and because my brother and Dad went to Eton - because therefore I originated to an extent in these very ruling classes that are supposed to be benefiting from this subservience? - even though I myself have no role in the Establishment at all and am as poor as an EFL teacher is liable to be. Is the wool pulled over my eyes because I want it to be? Well, I certainly hope not.
Maybe what conspiracy theorists fail to accept is that being a master is not so wonderful anyway. In order to keep your privilege you have to sacrifice your human freedom –and the riches of fearlessness- to protect your throne from those who covet it. The master is as much a slave as the slave –only differently. The whole system, let us be sure, is shot to hell and fuck and back again. The only answer, from within the system, is to recognize that there is no answer from within the system. Power lusts and the desire to get another’s dominance and defend your own, is not merely a central feature of the system, it is the system. Nietzsche was right. The Will to power is rampantly the Emperor of all. And the King…..well, the King, as usual, is crucified and waiting for his redemption, that he not be spurned by the land any more.
Thankfully, this imperious power lusting is not the final word. As it happens, the power lusting system that defines the public sphere, and much of the private, does not meet or fulfill our deeper needs. We know this in our art and in our love, and in our honest spirituality. We know it in our dreams and we know it when we cry and sometimes when we come. Actually what we want, with varying degrees of intensity and awareness, is what Withnail called an escape from ‘all this hideousness’. Actually, what we want is to become our true selves and to emerge from the shadow veils of Babylon, to wake up from the script of fear, of fight and flight, which encases us in our collective armour, the matrix of our own devising, our elaborate denials of the infinity and rapture that lies beneath far lost –the sleeping beauty within.
We live in two worlds. You might call them Babylon and the Kingdom of Heaven if you wish; or you might call them ignorance and gnorance (or gnosis as it has been called). Whatever you want to call them, we live in two worlds. But let us not, please, repeat the Cartesian error of opposing the physical with the spiritual, or even the bodily with the mental. The physical and the spiritual are two aspects of the same one essence of the universe, at different rates of velocity or refinement. The body and the mind are both inside the body and therefore both physical - and so are themselves both different from, though ultimately at one with, the spiritual. All indeed ultimately is one, as the lady we all know, who shines white light and wants to show, how everything still turns to Gold, keeps trying to remind us.
Golly gosh, do I come across as all dogmatic? Maybe I do. It’s true I feel a degree of conviction about these matters that inclines me not to be tentative. But words attract distortion, both in conception and interpretation, so I expect to be misunderstood. And the fact that “I don’t really care” if you agree with me, also, one hopes, keeps me undressed in the mantle of a lawmaker or dictator.
Actually, of course I do care if you disagree with me..but only in that everyday sense of frustration and because I wish to share a perception; not in a sense of anger, or gloom.
One of the principal roles for the state, beyond administering justice to restrain our vigilante blood-lusts, is to defend us from fear. Not only, then, to defend us from those who wish to hurt us, but to defend us from the fear of being attacked or blown up at any minute by emotional retards. Isn’t this why we voluntarily (for voluntary is what tax is –unless we live in a dictatorship) give the Government money to run those things called the police and the military? Are we sure that booming out dread and suspiciousness of our neighbour is entirely called for? Isn’t it the responsibility of those we pay to protect us to worry about the forces of death and incivility? Or is it that we are expected to help out, and share in the burden? But wouldn't that mean we are entitled to a rebate on our tax? Doesn’t this mean we are doing the Government's job for free?
We know we cannot live in a perfectly secure world. We’ve known this since we first stubbed our toes and cut ourselves and found that mother’s power could neither always protect us from these inconveniences, nor effortlessly dispel the attendant pain. So what is new, then, about thinking we might be blown up at any minute? We lived like that during the War and then for 40 years during the Cold War, but levity and innocence nonetheless survived. The chances today of course are very much that the vast majority of us, if not all of us, will not be blown up, especially if the security services are doing their job as well as one hopes and presumes they are. So why should we live in fear? This itself constitutes not so much ‘defeat’ (I eschew this ridiculously Zoroastrian talk of a war on an abstract noun - Terror); what it constitutes is Cowardice, that old chestnut of a vice which in these stuporific days has gone the way of many of the other vices and all the noble virtues - into the rancid soup of post-modern victimhood - which we quaff greedily, whilst sucking, uncertainly, on the consoling nipple of the void.
An important question to raise is whether it is the Governments of the World’s intention to actually make us frightened; not to protect us from an external enemy, but to make us the more easily controllable. One might, but needn’t, believe that the CIA brought down the Twin Towers deliberately in order to suspect this. The Marxist critique that religion is the invention of the masters to keep the slaves opiated into docile subservience - does this belief live on in an age wherein, faced with God’s shyness, if not his definitive non-existence, the masters can no longer rely on theologies and the eloquence of their priests to keep knees on the floor conveniently? Now, in the spirit of Orwell’s 1984, is it that fear as an end in-itself is now to be paraded nakedly. Is fear itself to become our new God?
Actually, while not denying that it is probable that some degree of dark intentionality indeed stalks the corridors of power, I am loathe, and desire to be loathe, to accept that the Al-Qaeda threat is a mere mirage conjured by dark cabals who want us to remain bricks in their walls, insulating and preserving their dominance over us. Do I think this, I wonder, only because my Grandfather was a Bishop and my other Grandfather an MD and because my brother and Dad went to Eton - because therefore I originated to an extent in these very ruling classes that are supposed to be benefiting from this subservience? - even though I myself have no role in the Establishment at all and am as poor as an EFL teacher is liable to be. Is the wool pulled over my eyes because I want it to be? Well, I certainly hope not.
Maybe what conspiracy theorists fail to accept is that being a master is not so wonderful anyway. In order to keep your privilege you have to sacrifice your human freedom –and the riches of fearlessness- to protect your throne from those who covet it. The master is as much a slave as the slave –only differently. The whole system, let us be sure, is shot to hell and fuck and back again. The only answer, from within the system, is to recognize that there is no answer from within the system. Power lusts and the desire to get another’s dominance and defend your own, is not merely a central feature of the system, it is the system. Nietzsche was right. The Will to power is rampantly the Emperor of all. And the King…..well, the King, as usual, is crucified and waiting for his redemption, that he not be spurned by the land any more.
Thankfully, this imperious power lusting is not the final word. As it happens, the power lusting system that defines the public sphere, and much of the private, does not meet or fulfill our deeper needs. We know this in our art and in our love, and in our honest spirituality. We know it in our dreams and we know it when we cry and sometimes when we come. Actually what we want, with varying degrees of intensity and awareness, is what Withnail called an escape from ‘all this hideousness’. Actually, what we want is to become our true selves and to emerge from the shadow veils of Babylon, to wake up from the script of fear, of fight and flight, which encases us in our collective armour, the matrix of our own devising, our elaborate denials of the infinity and rapture that lies beneath far lost –the sleeping beauty within.
We live in two worlds. You might call them Babylon and the Kingdom of Heaven if you wish; or you might call them ignorance and gnorance (or gnosis as it has been called). Whatever you want to call them, we live in two worlds. But let us not, please, repeat the Cartesian error of opposing the physical with the spiritual, or even the bodily with the mental. The physical and the spiritual are two aspects of the same one essence of the universe, at different rates of velocity or refinement. The body and the mind are both inside the body and therefore both physical - and so are themselves both different from, though ultimately at one with, the spiritual. All indeed ultimately is one, as the lady we all know, who shines white light and wants to show, how everything still turns to Gold, keeps trying to remind us.
Golly gosh, do I come across as all dogmatic? Maybe I do. It’s true I feel a degree of conviction about these matters that inclines me not to be tentative. But words attract distortion, both in conception and interpretation, so I expect to be misunderstood. And the fact that “I don’t really care” if you agree with me, also, one hopes, keeps me undressed in the mantle of a lawmaker or dictator.
Actually, of course I do care if you disagree with me..but only in that everyday sense of frustration and because I wish to share a perception; not in a sense of anger, or gloom.
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