Digital Dysphoria and Collective Mind Wars

AMERICAN ICONOGRAPHY IN THE STARS

America's obsession with culture and personality is baked into its DNA. In the Western pagan world, billions of bucks circulate the endocrine system that distributes the gorgonizing theatre of personality and fates. Celebrity (the Archetypal personality) in America has always given us an appeal for our imagination, as the gods and demigods of ancient Greece and Rome have. They're not on an island, embodied as maxims, but right here, carved by every individual's hand.

The blueprint for the American eye romanticizes power and aesthetics first in Ancient Egypt. Celebrities and politicians, Titans of Sport, were our myth bearers. A tradition later influenced Christianity's idea of the sacred individual's soul. People become Icons as carriers of the divine forces of good, evil, lust, and redemption, as "The wish for kings is an old and familiar wish, as well-known in medieval Europe as in ancient Mesopotamia," writes Lewis Lapham in The Wish For Kings. In this way, the archetypal develops from thousands of years of the icon as a symbol into the fertile landscape of human consciousness.

Words are strange and beautiful sounds we make from our mouths pitched to phonetic percussive rhythms that become known to us as language. They are symbols as sound that we have evolved to interface with the stratum of reality. Ancient Alchemy is a practice of transformation. To shape it and become shaped, transformed, words part the seas of our soul. They create great chasms in the cloudy ether of mind to light a single soul’s path in communion with God, but when they’re untethered from the correcting mechanism established by cultural rules of open exchange, they can lead to conflict.

Some conflict is necessary when ideas clash. Without a strong arm, the best ideas can win. The best defense we have against barbarism is free speech. Free speech allows this process to play out with minimal damage. A realistic understanding of the violence in our history, minimal, is good. A history marred with literal hell on Earth deems ‘minimal’ an achievement of balance, considering humans have had their trigger finger aimed at Earth. Conflict by the petty tyrant stands alone in nature.

In nature, what is needed is taken. Rituals of birth and death keep the balance. Humans are more complex in that we create complexity independent of nature, so much so that we live in our symbolic abstraction of thought instead of interfacing with reality through consciousness.

The speech process works as a best practice to keep us away from the chaos of nature, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. In fact, many cultures we stand on the graves of reflect a fatal degeneration between mankind and his sense of soul and animalism. Whenever a collective uses this process to plug up the flow of information (hoping they do it long enough to simply squeeze the life out of ideas they deem wrong, immoral, and against their tribe), the trojan horse enters the dominion of the public mind.

Collectivism that uses the good of free speech as a cover to legislate who may or may not take part with a new order, instead of allowing the best order to become adopted through the marketplace of values, is a dark collective. The tactic of force to enact the goal of any particular tribe, regardless of creed or color, is wrong. If not for its regressiveness, we cannot think if we cannot speak.

Freedom of choice matters, even the choice to say something offensive. That’s to say: respect for life is evident in the respect for different consciousness. People who claim the loudest, mainstream moralisms of the day often have the slightest regard for different consciousness and its right to exist. What we call political and social turmoil have their seeds in the trojan horses of obfuscation of free and open dialogue, the dictate by the strong arm of censorship.

Dark collectives are the artifact destroyers of the world. While images are symbolic, symbols come from pools of consciousness. Thought becomes an edifice for a way of living. Destroying symbols is an act of aggression against what another tribe connects to psycho-spiritual means. That’s to say: language is both a symbol and a tool, the magical element of animation in evolutionary form. Symbols are the tools for dimensions of reality we as humans take part in for the hopeful union of the psyche (or self) with Godhead. Is it any mystery why wars are fought to protect ideas? Ideas are the sky, and language are the stars.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In 2024, we have hindsight in our view: two decades after the first-ever technological upgrade of the public mind since Television, modern dissatisfaction grows as technology evolves. The modern dilemma is having so much more than people in history and suffering from the disease of excess. Only in the West can you make up a problem to solve because your belly is full while information is available to even those not willing to seek it or admonish it.

Change shakes societies, as old ways lose currency, new pathways open channels of traffic flow, sparking competition, ultimately, loss of meaning. Wars we wage within the psyche will produce dissociations for some of the population, seen in the decline of the nuclear family in the west. Today regardless of inequality, we are less grappled with abject poverty.

Now, most Westerners suffer anxiety, depression, or hysterics. As the rapid speed of new technologies ease the fracturing of our evolutionary trajectory, will cheap and free sooner or later drive us away from the humanism that sustains us? I spoke about freedom of speech being essential for thinking.

Talking through things takes a lot more work and a lot more energy. Speech is an idea-correcting mechanism we have evolved as a barrier from the barbarity of nature, part, and parcel, because we are both a product of and expatriate to nature. Political and social turmoil have their seeds in the trojan horses of moral justifications because of a panic that justifies the obfuscation of free and open dialogue. Dictates by the strong arm of censorship are the tactic of the collective hive-mind.

Today you can contact someone in Africa from NYC by moving your finger over a glass screen. That’s magical progress for a species that’s still using the same hardware.

Before wireless communication became the norm, its first genesis was in the sprawling telecommunications produced in the United States, connecting people like magic many miles away. Before that, in the systematic distribution of letters. Today you can contact someone in Africa from NYC by moving your finger over a glass screen. That's magical progress for a species still using the same hardware.

It's a lot of work to make society healthy. It's a lot of work sustaining lessons across generations against our lesser devils. Biological impulses crave fast and easy. Our drives keep us alive, but anger and desire are the perpetual fast food of emotions. Harnessing them for good required schools to shape and teach members of society that, while they're linked to creative power, their caustic nature is inescapable.

Knowing the balance separates individuals from becoming slaves to self-illusion and falling for the impulse of Ego-based identities. The perpetual child syndrome results from a society with great technology and little purpose for meaning. Meaning is found in the closeness to the life experience and vitality. In ancient times, these processes were ritualized in tasks young adults had to achieve.

The Yogic system described the lower Chakras around 1500, and 500 BC in ancient Indian texts called the Vedas. This conceptual framework of energetic systems is then seen in scientific observations of flight-or-flight (also called hyperarousal or the acute stress response) by Walter Bradford Cannon through new x-ray technological advancements that allowed Cannon to produce his work on The fight-or-flight response. What gives the Rabbit a fighting chance to escape the fox's jaws can give Jim, the Gen-Z employee working at Twitter, anxiety.

So what would the world look like without fire? If we're to evolve with our technology, we must reevaluate our relationship with the fruit of labor. The sweetest fruit is a healthy functioning society. A society invested in self-intelligence, as a fundamental critical ideal. We must not only do this for the triumph of truth over delusion but because it determines our survival.

That has been my experience, forgoing college for apprenticeship and expertise by doing, armed only with a library card and a bit of wanderlust. From the Brooklyn Public Library to the beaches on Long Island, and working on the Tarmac of JFK Airport working Ground Operations, asking the maker the questions of a wandering mind: the echo, what you're reading. If you like what you're reading, please check out my store to find out how you can support my work, a working-class guy self-taught in mythos.