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To change what is wrong, you first have to be willing to understand it. Without that understanding positive change is impossible.
AMERICA THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF EMPTINESS
COMMUNITY of emptiness..The concept of community has been radically diminished across the decades. This is largely the result of American style religion. Deprival of community tends to be part of the goad towards kingdom of god spirituality, where secular community is more forcefully replaced by the church gathering, with its own belief that real community only becomes possible in a messianic context, and is not of this world. This is a radical reduction in pressure upon congregations to create and maintain real and truly functional communities beyond their being a shadow of a future not yet. In this world disconnection, loss, and depersonalization, with token charity, being the rules not so much the exceptions. Congregational community, as a taste of a future not yet attainable, is less attractive when there is a real, functional, secular community that truly meets any of its members needs and wants. New forms of geographic dislocation, of nomadism, that skips like a stone across the social and cultural waters, touching down hardly anywhere and hardly at all, before its sojourn ends in sinking down. Every such strike against the water is the same. This brings us to the issue of personal emptiness.
PERSONAL emptiness. The formal, depersonalized, relation takes increasing precedence over the personal and more intimate. Whether in congregation or in professionalism, extending to a quasi professionalism that invades and pervades every other form of human activity whether money is directly involved or not, personal emptiness gains ground against personalization. Really knowing anyone becomes increasingly questionable, redefined in terms of an increasing superficiality. This decreases the distance between knowing other persons, as persons, and what any individual can claim to know about God, as God is defined as being within the system. This trend becomes progressively worse, increasing the levels of alienation and depersonalization until there is ultimately no difference between knowing any individual person, and the idea of knowing God. The main exception to that becomes the sexual act traditionally defined as knowing of one’s marriage partner, but that knowing also is redefined in shallower personal terms, ultimately devalued to no more than sexual intercourse. This is consistent with a concerted attack on the concept of individual identity. Personal knowing, outside of sexual intercourse, and particularly between genders in a heterosexual context, is increasingly put into question as a superficial illusion, empty of further real meaning. This is tacitly encouraged by the official encouraging and tolerance for various forms of identity fraud, made increasingly popular without adequate challenge from psychology, sociology and psychiatry who are co-opted into the same game plan to further an ideology of personal emptiness.
ENVIRONMENTAL emptiness comes from the fact that the world’s religions largely stand opposed to any adequate progress on environment and natural conservation issues. America is a leader in this emptiness, not simply a pragmatic follower of it. The world's largest religions see the world in antinomian terms, at best, as only material to be used, of little or no intrinsic value, and to be discarded in favor of an other worldliness that stands directly antithetical to belief in facilitating legitimate enjoyment of this world and nurturing true caring for it. To the contrary destruction of the environment is a major catalyst for antinomianist spirituality, right wing religion as it is often called, and thus a cherished mechanism. That causes most environmental leadership to be merely a lie, in distinction to what is seen as the higher religious truth. The science of environmentalism and conservation being deprecated by that hierarchical ordering defining what is to be understood as truth and ultimately as environmental morality and wisdom.
This need to destroy the environment, inclusive of social and natural environment, as well as both leisure and working environments, in as many ways as possible, is closely tied to strategic emptiness and the need for apocalypticism.
STRATEGIC emptiness. It is largely too late to cure many of the lasting effects of the American led strategy of using its own religious beliefs in conjunction with technical weaponry of war, as both justification and means in conflict. Religion was a major contention in Cold War motivation against the USSR, feeding potentially world destroying apocalypticism. Apocalytpicism is religious belief in a to be most desired end of worldly existence by means of violence. It claims to be among the highest values. The same strategy became a catalyst for pushed against the wall violent conflict with Islamists who have hardened their own lines in consequence into a new and equally unreconcilable dialetical opposition. Both sides now being lockd in deadly irrational struggle. American spirituality has shown that it requires that type of dialectic opposition for its own survival, and that without that strategy, having a fully and completely opposed enemy, in a game of good and evil it itself becomes spiritually empty of one of its most fundamental and cherished meanings. Other ideals tend to be notwithstanding this ultimate value of two ideological extremes in absolute dialectical, god and satan, pardigmatic opposition.
PSYCHOLOGICAL emptiness. Following environmental and strategic emptiness, we find that human potential is redefined in terms of a retrogressive conservative determinism whose will is the destruction of individual attainment as being purely vanity, and of no real value. This takes the form of denial of acknowledgment and rewards, of personal interest in a culture of widely enforced disinterest, even in the majority of exceptional instances of exceptional strivings and achievements. The deprecation of the majority of strivings as false valued vanity, at the same time confers privilege of relatively eased attainment to a few, tokenizing with the illusion that similar opportunity is available to anyone. The latter merely the illusion of potential, obstacled by the belief as to what is seen as a higher truth.
CULTURAL emptiness. Included in this is the promotion of the trend that sinks lasting quality of cultural products, in terms of any universalizable and absolute standards of quality down to a culture of the lowest common denominators. The desire to make culture emptier, less attractive, but to retain its mass appeal in terms of statistics of production and marketing, as a flood of commonness, creates an emptiness that is far less competitive with the integral rational emptiness of otherworldy concepts. It is always easier to promote a materially empty concept, and irrational belief in that concept, when material culture is itself made increasingly empty and lacking in more meaningful content, true art, and craftsmanship. We also see the trend to increasing cultural emptiness in the arts where completely abstract and hyper realist tendencies are often all that remain, because they offer no content or context for further interpretation beyond a superficial, and largely uncommunicative aesthetic. Aesthetic objects increasingly lose their opportunity, placed in conflict with religion, and its denial of art having a role in what it sees as a more true and real system of revelation. Art as illigitimate usurper takes a beating, relegated to mere kitsch and costly ornamentation at best, stripped of any deeper and wider signification.
POLITICAL emptiness. This is a peculiar factor, often unthought about. It has deep roots in the beginnings of American independence. Overthrow of the British colonial governance parallels the Biblical paradigm of revolt against the kingdom of God in Heaven. We must recall that there is a long tradition of divine right of kings in England and Europe. A tradition making the king second only to God in command over all the people. Democracy, as governance, is therefore seen as flawed from the start and guilty of the Satanic crime. Democracy fallen from grace, and only intermediary to a future kingdom of God, under number one, God himself, rather than number two, the mortal king, becomes the assuaging of the original guilt of overthrow against the king’s legitimacy of rule. Democracy, though given a value, is seen ultimately as evil, not as good, and to be replaced by messianic rule in a kingdom of God. This places governance in a peculiarly empty situation, as a temporary condition, that need not strive for excellence. Excellence comes after that democratic governance is replaced by the more absolute. This tension tends to empty governance of a significant part of its efficacy, and to put it into contention with the specific brand of theism that is constantly put into struggle against governance’s secularism.
Added to this is the idea of “in god we trust” appearing conspicuous reminder, even on the monetary currency, creating both the delusion that monetary relations are not given the primacy tht they in fact are given, and further destroying trust in governance. It puts into question trust in any other person or persons. It legitimizes distrust and thus promotes and excuses untrustworthy behavior as the normative worldly condition. Again stimulating social antinomianism.
COMMUNICATIVE emptiness. The trend is one of increasingly passing over in silence, most matters of contention. Dissent and disagreement, no matter how rational and reasoning, scientific or otherwise right, is discouraged by that fact. So too are many forms of relation between persons. It leads to the murder of genuine dialogue and to the slaughter of many forms of progress. One of the ways in which this is encouraged is to attack communication with its most negative opposition, destroying its more positive valuation. Silence is golden tends to become the catch phrase mimicking the right wing fundamentalist religious position. The failures to teach and explain positively, arising from this trend to increasing emptiness, are consistent with a society that is moving away from reason towards an increasing reliance on what it believes is divine revelation. It is also a radical deprecating of the role of many forms of positive human activity and potential cooperation, in favor of an increasingly world denying antinomianism.
MEDICAL emptiness. Increasingly we see the religious concept that claims that whomever loves his own life shall lose it, working against any concepts of universal accessibility, equality, and real true quality of medical care. For many medicine is increasingly negligent and palliative rather than life enhancing, but the prevalent religious belief system offers justification for the failings that then increasingly pervade much of the provision provided by the system. Governance again tends to show little interest or intent as to rectifying an ideology that takes away much of the responsibility and accountability for provision from both practitioners and from government. Private enterprise and for profit medicine would have a difficult justification, as they exist today and as they are tending to evolve in America, without religion to support their tendencies towards a medicine of emptiness. Rising costs, and declining options as to private insurance, add greatly to the trend. Life utterly impoverished as the cure to illness, is certainly not life deemed worth cherishing. Instead it is made more empty.
MATERIAL emptiness. While capitalism and concepts of the right of private ownership conflicted with communism and its distrust and distaste for private ownership, the religious mentality tends to attack private ownership while denying the possibility of cooperative collectivization at the same time. Attacks on owning the means of production, are becoming as frequent, due to religious argument, as are attacks against collectivism as being fundamentally anti-capitalist and therefore an evil undermining of the system. This extremely complex scenario, with its tendencies to reliance on emotional irrationalism, is among the most difficult to grapple with. Ownership of things, and particularly means of production and means for development of talents and necessary for achievements, in an essentially positively non cooperative, highly individually competitive and often extremely divisive social environment, tends to be surprisingly poorly protected, in spite of the increased necessity to pursue such means within the entirety of the socio-political and economic context of the prevalent ideology. However the attacks against ownership and having the means, particularly against those who are not particularly well advantaged, tend to be largely religious in their content and method.
In particular the social welfare systems, long kept utterly inadequate to truly support any sustaining and real betterment of any others other than the criminal element, tends to tie itself closely with religion, ignoring its own extremes of practical failure and is diminishing and thwarting of human potential. After all, material emptiness is given positive value, inclusive of welfare’s inadequacies, and the failure of the system as a whole to protect and safeguard material means for social and practical advancement. Instead it chooses to put that very same under a multitude of forms of nearly constant covert manipulative threat and overt attack, usually providing religious excuses as the sole justification, believing that is justification for allowing that violence. The inadequacy of the social welfare system and its persistent tacit forcing of dependency on itself, by failure to provide more positive means and knowledge, have a religious basis, not a socially scientific basis.
Religion also encourages failure, in terms of material bankruptcy, in other ways. Its antinomian, thus anti materialist, strains of belief, tend to support the loss of means more than they support the successful application of means and the preservation of material progress. Many of the traditional practices, unscientific and irrational as they are, are supported in that direction, without much real challenge from authority. The lack of questioning of the religious basis for the use of bankruptcy, and other losses of means, tends to persist, and even the lowest forms of frauds, confidence tricksters, and all manner of similarly evil practices, are thus given a surprising amount of respect and opportunity, due to their being seen as a natural religious tool, furthering belief in religious concepts concerning material loss as a legitimate means meant to lead to a gain in “spirituality”.
SEXUAL emptiness. This tends to prevail in terms of the traditional concept of the man being the head of the woman, meant to guide her (due to belief in her essentially evil nature) to the good that only man truly knows. Oddly this very same belief in total subordination of the female psyche, under a religious dictate as part of what are seen as the highest values, leads to many forms of deviation becoming essentially a homosexual preserve. What is ok for same sex, is essentially made unavailable to heterosexual relations. Peculiarly this form of increasing prejudice and manipulation, contrary to individuality and diversity of expression in heterosexuality, has stimulated those of bisexual nature to choose homosexual options as the only pathway open to them for achieving any real sexual freedom from what amounts to a constraint to sexual emptiness. Added to this is the peculiar concept that if religion condemns the gay already, for being gay, their further condemnation, for other deviations, is no longer a matter for worthwhile contention. Thus, heterosexuality tends to be the most prejudiced against and the most constrained to increased emptiness as to variant possibilities of individual creativity and expression, affecting both cultural, particularly artistic, and social spheres of activity.
In conjunction with that twist of the human condition is the fact that the system of emptiness constantly strives to diminish the natural role of sexual relations in terms of other forms of positive partnership, meant to achieve other pragmatic, social and economic purposes. Another form of divide and conquer, diminish and destroy in terms of enhancement of opportunity and achievement, it relies on a religious justification, denying science its truth and validity. Even in terms of furthering human well being, the sexual relation is denied its scientific importance, by placing irrational religion above those rationally measurable and provable facts.
THEOLOGICAL emptiness. This is too complex to delve deeply into here. What it entails is a rejection of most forms of philosophy and deeper, more reasoning, consideration, inclusive of a rejection of science (which is derivative from philosophy as its foundation), in favor of naive, unthinking, unquestioning, acceptance of a irrational system of rigid, unyielding, belief. It is essentially unevolutionary, and non progressive. It remains a frozen system insulated from any intelligence and isolated from from any increase in scientific knowledge.
AMERICA as a culture of emptiness, increasingly reliant on that concept of emptiness, is rooted in its origins in Puritanism. The Puritans left England, because they were unable to accept progressive changes, and chose instead to hold to retrogressive conservatism, against progressive social evolution and the growing primacy of rationality and reason. A closed, non progressive, system of extreme religious conservatism Puritanism harkened back to the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the persecutions of religious heresy and differing, that prevailed in Europe, before America was founded. The result of those origins is a system that fails in its own struggle with emptiness, itself becoming a culture of emptiness where that emptiness is revalued and redefined as in closest relation to what is defined, within the religious system, as ultimate good, and absolutized as the door of imposed choice, to what is determined within that system as being ultimate truth.
Robert Morpheal
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