"Star cross'd lovers take their life." 'Life' is singular. One life is lost when Romeo and Juliet die, because the two characters form one character in death. Romeo + Juliet (1996) prologue. (1996) © 20th Century Fox Video Source: Youtube.
The New Millennium is synonymous with the future, and if you identify with that future, you may have noticed a trend which enflames polarities, but then oddly reconciles opposites, even between right- and left-wing politics. A Millennial third way seeks the Sun (masculine), Moon (feminine), and Stars (the higher union). Or: Past, Present, and Future.
There are different routes to the third way, and not every path is positive. The future's third way may follow the current course of world politics. After a prologue in conflict, it may destroy polarities through war and conflagration. Or it may erase polarities through technological, social and biological engineering.
Whether we follow the path of war or technocracy, the course will be materialistic. There is an alternative, however, which is anti-materialist. This blog post continues my series, What's Left Over?, which reappraises Millennial politics and political culture in terms of materialism and anti-materialism. I argue that the alternative media are not alt-right so much as alt-material. Their radicalism is not grounded in outdated left-right political paradigms, as much as it is in the political connotations of living in, and with, virtual reality.
Prologue in Conflict
U.S. set to hit China with new wave of tariffs on September 1st (31 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.
Paradoxically, the institution of higher, unifying principles is preceded today by a deliberate exacerbation and intensification of differences. It could be one way of bringing about the desired union in the long term. Think of a couple fighting, followed by make-up sex. This may be the long game behind mainstream propaganda which has worsened political differences and regional tensions and has left us feeling that there is no chance to negotiate in order to solve problems.
Boris Johnson suggests prorogation will help negotiate Brexit deal with EU (30 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.
'Boris Johnson, shame on you': thousands protest against prorogation (31 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.
Brexit. Lebanon. Kashmir. Hong Kong. Egypt. You may abhor or adore the populists and their elitist opponents, or the democratic and anti-democratic factions, or honour the aggressors or victims. But it could be that all are servants of this greater aim, this third way, whether they know it or not. They worsen conflicts which will eventually obliterate the very barriers they are erecting. And perhaps this was the aim all along, to push things so far that finally we begin to break down divisions between different perspectives and ways of living.
Hong Kong riot police seen beating protesters in clash at metro station (31 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.
A transcendent third way to overcome past and present problems is a very old idea. It is evident in symbols like the Yin and Yang, the Hammer and Sickle, and the Star of David or Shatkona. All could be taken as representations of the act of sex, the union of masculine and feminine energies. Equally important in east and west, as critical for the ancients as for the moderns, the higher union or third way is a code for nothing less than the survival of our species. As such, it is a positive idea.
The Hammer and Sickle symbol goes beyond the Hegelian dialectic. It confirms the occult roots of socialism. The hammer represents masculinity, while the sickle refers to femininity in harvest and death. Both symbols imply creative and destructive aspects of gender symbolism in northern mythological traditions. Image Source: Russia Beyond.
Materialist Marxists: A Plague on Both Your Houses
ROMEO+JULIET (1996) MERCUTIO'S DEATH SCENE (HD) (22 December 2018). The closing pineapple stand in this scene signifies a closing of the third eye, a denial of higher consciousness. Video Source: Youtube.
However, there are different theories on how to bring about this third way and not all are positive. In some cases, survival becomes equated with greater conflict. We are not sure how we will or should survive. The barriers between opposites can come be removed through sex or death, union or destruction, rejuvenation or revolution. There is a moment of choice. As with Mercutio's choice above, it is possible to choose a third way between two houses which is wholly destructive. Chaos, war and death ensue.
West Side Story (1961) - One Hand, One Heart (29 August 2015). Video Source: Youtube.
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was retold in the mid-1950s-era musical, West Side Story, in which the characters state: "It's not us, it's everything around us." The masculine and feminine powers merge through love, but are overwhelmed by external social conditions and ensuing hatreds. Where Shakespeare's early modern play features the characters' wealth as a barrier to reconciliation, in West Side Story, poverty proves equally divisive. Whether the characters are rich or poor, the Romeo and Juliet story translates equally well.
This small point illustrates an error in the Marxist fixation on class as the key for fomenting and ultimately overcoming social inequality and conflict. Dualism must be resolved by something beyond materialist categories such as social class. The answer does not lie in focusing on the physical world. The solution is not found in what is around us and outside of us.
Modern Times: Camille Paglia and Jordan B Peterson (2 October 2017). Video Source: Youtube.
Camille Paglia insists that the Marxist attempt to resolve dualism through the Hegelian dialectic fails ideologically because its materialism is in bad taste:
Materialist Technologists: The Transgender Experiment"These professors ... who allege that art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against another group. These people are philistines. ... They're middle brow, hopelessly middle brow. They have no sense of beauty. They have no sense of the aesthetic. Now, Marxism does indeed assert this. Marxism tries to reconfigure the universe in terms of materialism. It ... does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension. Now, I'm an atheist, but I see the great world religions as enormous works of art ... as the best way to understand the universe and man's place in it. ... They're like enormous poems. ... The true revolution would have been to make the core curriculum of world education ... [focus on] the great religions of the world. ... The real sixties' vision was about exultation, elevation, cosmic consciousness, all of these things were rejected by these ... intellectual midgets who seized onto Lacan, Derrida and Foucault."
In the past, left-wing and liberal theorists focused on polarities as a source of social ills and tried to repair them by adjusting external conditions. Policies concerned physical appearance, age and gender. This is a superficial approach to biology, medicine, and social engineering. As with the Marxist political constructions around class, materialist technologists view everything from the outside in, in terms of physical conditions. They see only measurable and quantifiable contingencies which can be tweaked to build their non-binary third way.
At present, materialist technologists can find no greater binary in the world than gender. They intend to overcome gender's biological boundaries by using invasive scientific methods. They mean to bring their external judgments right into the body. This will be the way they transform gender into a purely social construct, a function of individual liberty and choice. For all the talk of gender spectrums and how gender is just a matter of how a person feels and chooses to behave along the gender spectrum from day to day, this is no formula for personal expression. The endeavour is still imposed upon the individual from outside. It depends on changing the external world to shift the internal world, rather than the other way around. This was why the University of California at Berkeley banned gender-specific words in July 2019.
Image Source: imgur. (Thanks to -S. )
The tone is less about reconciliation of opposites and more about forcing a benevolent higher concept, a third way, from the outside in. Transgender rights advocates attack binary-minded cisgenders as regressive conservatives. Non-binary activists see gender as a social choice and social construct, not a biological fact. If gender is a medical condition, one can 'transition' out of it with drugs, hormones and surgeries. As a result, the problem really becomes one of mind over matter. Those who persist with their stubborn binary mindset must be psychologically reprogrammed.
Again, transitioning out of one's gender reflects an extreme belief in materialism, where almost any concept is reducible to physical circumstances, which can in turn be altered with scientific and technological tools.
Ideologically, transgenderism represents the union of masculine and feminine principles. The aim is positive, as it is with all third way paths. Proponents want to make ideals real. They want to perfect the imperfect, to overcome the flawed physical condition of division and disconnection. Radical materialists find spiritual transcendence in the material world through their brute-forced experiments. They do not see abominations or twisted nature in their artificial results, but an enhanced natural state. Unfortunately, because the approach is materialistic, these methods and ideas pretend to be infinitely tolerant but are actually coercive.
What are TERFs? (3 October 2017). Video Source: Youtube.
In the video below, Gloria Steinem defends transgender rights as part of the unfinished battle to control women's bodies and manage the means of reproduction in the human species. Again, the values are materialistic and fixate on manipulating the physical world with science and technology. This is a broad materialist social agenda, masquerading as a defense of the individual: "We need to change society to suit the individual, not the individual to suit society." One Youtuber who supported Steinem's view saw a continued acceptance of biological gender as a backward adherence to base animality. In this perspective, the higher path can only be realized in the course of enhanced, supra-animalistic human life on earth:
If the third way represents a reconciliation between opposites, and gender is the greatest binary we know, then surely the reconciliation is best expressed through sexual intercourse and reproduction. Steinem's argument absolutely removes reproduction from the realm of what her follower would call "sordid animality" and places it in the materialist's lab, where the process can be rationalized and managed."The West owes its success to freedom to express individuality. Being born in an animal body, you're preoccupied with what a pack of animals do and do not. Human life is too short to be personally concerned with a few men dressing as women. You think you're profound, but you're actually a fool concerned with sordid animality."
Gloria Steinem on feminism and transgender rights (24 November 2015). Video Source: Youtube.
Microcosms of Dualism: We Dare not Dream
Political conflicts and technologically-driven social engineering are the most obvious signs of extreme polarization before the collapse of dualism. There are other symptoms. A divided society is one that willfully blinds itself to alternatives in thought and life. Tension builds as the unseen mysteries of life demand more and more attention.
In a materialist order, controlling psychic yearnings becomes a physical, rather than a spiritual, challenge.
Walk along any metropolitan street, and you will see people clutching paper cups and gulping coffee. Their bid to stay awake and keep working at all costs reveals their need to avoid the unconscious realm. In the Id, the mind can impose no linear control of internal, private reality. And so the polarities go deeper, out of our daily lives and into our souls.
Image Source: Cartoon Stock.
This means that Starbucks is synonymous with a society that dares not sleep and thus dares not dream; dares not miss a deadline; dares not let go of rational order; dares not break rules imposed from outside. This is a society constructed materialistically from the outside in, appraised as normal by cruel egos. No time or space is left by the conscious self for the unconscious life. This collective mind favours linear over non-linear narratives. Sooner or later, there will be a correction.
See all posts in the What's Left Over? series on materialism and anti-materialism in technological advancement.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment