Politics won't fix it

By : Alutha Jamancar

 

Politics won't fix what ails our world. Politics is designed to move various existing solutions in and out of favor.

 

The reality of the world as we have known it, has lost its "stickiness," its cohesiveness. It is expiring. We can't patch it up, fix it up, make it better, or swing the clock back to an earlier era.

 

It is not the case that one political party or the other has gone mad and is to blame. Everyone – despite evidence to the contrary – did not suddenly take 'stupid' pills in the course of the last 5 years. The tribal agreements, paths, emotional & psychic watering holes that sustained us, have disintegrated before our very eyes. There is shock, disorientation, & a reflexive clawing at tattered remnants of culture, of safety, of familiarity. As we cling to those remnants & point at the 'other,' the remnants continue to disintegrate.

 

We are alone. Nobody did this to us. It happens. The model of the world, our world, is expiring. A model – this kind of model – is a collection of myths, of stories, we repeat to one another endlessly. Some of us agreed with the myths, some rebelled against the myths. All of us defined ourselves by them. And those stories, those myths, are losing their cohesiveness. They have aged, and are rotting. They will need to be replaced.

 

We do the replacing naturally. We moved from nomads to city-builders. We moved from tribal groups to elaborate empires. We moved slave- & property-owners to free-thinkers. We moved from empire to dark ages, from renaissance to industrialized workforces, from colonies to self-governing nations. The movement is never automatically from dark to light. We have had many dark periods in our long shared histories. Each transition between "world models" or continuums was disruptive by definition, and tumultuous at best. Cherished identities & roles disappeared, livelihoods vanished, new roles – and new rules – appeared, often times seemingly at random. Power, control, and authority shifted, splintered, and re-formed.

 

This is what lies ahead. And politics won't *fix* it. At the rate of disintegration, it won't even forestall it anymore.

 

There are immediate stop-gap measures that can be taken – get food to a town in Somalia where 3000 children are starving. Fight for rights of workers to have safe workplaces. Work to create easier access to the internet for distressed populations. And if addressing any of these short-term problems are what you feel called to do – great. But creating a new continuum – a new model of reality – is the overriding priority going forward. Otherwise that 3000 turns to 3,000,000, struggling workers turn to rioters, and distressed populations become managed by gunships. That is the future that beckons, if we fail to create a more compelling continuum. If you aren't working on that new continuum, you had better be supporting someone who is – and who is effective.

 

So stop looking to political leaders for solutions, and stop bickering with whomever you disagree with. Neither will help you face … or create … the future.

* * *

 

Our personal identities are wrapped up in the stories we persuade the world to tell about us — to "agree with," essentially. Lack of privacy … means we lose control of our narratives, our own mythos. Even today, people are struggling with sharing formerly privately-held political views … on the internet. They are often … finding themselves forced to defend or abandon … previously closely identified ideas and stands. Who they are … who they associate with … who they tolerate / admonish / admire … is now undergoing a rapid kind of axe-grinding.

We are forced … in the gaudy lights on the internet … to be more starkly defined, less nebulous. One scandal, one 'perceived' black mark … and you are discarded and scorned by one of the many zeitgeist mobs roaming the digistratus.

The richness, complexity, multilayeredness … of Jung's Self … is being flattened. We are — using the ongoing erosion of privacy — reducing ourselves to Ones or Zeroes.

Pretty much every historical figure admired today … was also a scoundrel in certain circles. An unrepentant mess.

We are trading our mess for plastic & vinyl, and are the worse for it.