Archive for the ‘pleasure’ tag
The Gods Have Gone Underground
Starbucks Poster, XinBei Changzhou 2011
Yes, Starbucks in found in Changzhou. I know of two different Starbucks locations in this city of three and a half million people. Joining Starbucks are other corporate entities that no-no-borders such as Macdonalds, Subway, Pizza Hut, and KFC. There is no question in my mind that the powers behind the scenes are now visible through these outlets. It has stopped being about nation versus nation, about one political belief system versus yet another system. The real Power is Prosperity, Progress, and Pleasure.
“The loss of relationship to the invisible powers makes the visible powers all the more powerful. We have corporate moguls running government, as deceitfully as they ran corporations . . .” (Hollis, Mythologems, p. 99)
It isn’t as though we “want” to be ruled by these power brokers, to be ruled by others who have no agenda other than being on top, holding as much power as can be held. The election of Obama as the president of the United States of America was watched by people all over the world, people who saw this event as belonging to them as well. Perhaps an individual with a vision could recapture a sense of humanity, could take back the power lost. But, like all the other leaders, he is a man that is constrained and contained, essentially powerless. His advisors have advisors, and the advice doesn’t advance the will and the needs and the dreams of people who have chosen him as their leader. What has been delivered in the U.S.A. and all western world democracies and the up and coming countries such as China is something different.
“. . . the spectacle of modern social and political interaction is little more than the exercise of the old will to power serving contemporary neuroses. The outcome is no longer in doubt. We end in neuroses, in addictions, power and displays of enthusiasm, banality, diversions of increasing urgency, and more and more loneliness. The gods have hardly departed; they have simply gone underground and reappear as wounds, as inflations, as pathologies. Our contemporary suffering is not tragic, for we wrestle not with gods; rather it is pathetic, the suffering which is unconscious and invariably victimizing of self and others.” (Hollis, Mythologems, p. 99)
Choose any location you want in today’s modern world and look carefully. Consciousness is not much in evidence. The events in the U.S.A. defy common sense, the lack of ethical behaviour in Canada’s leadership are two examples in a world that has lost its moral compass. With the loss of the gods, the vacuum has been filled with greed and the other deadly sins. The call to fundamentalist religions does not hold the answer, for they too are more about remaining as unconscious as possible.
Enough.
