Today I haven’t one profound thing to say. I’m sure of it. Take a chance (reader) and read on. Take a chance (writer) and write on. We all live in a yellow submarine....
It should not be a strange thing to say that the world is a stranger place than it usually seems and a much more mundane place than it sometimes seems. But it is, nevertheless for most people, a strange thing to hear. How many of us see the sun as a star and reflect that it may be a part of another world’s nightly constellations? How many of us familiar with a map of the United States ever reflect that we, indeed, are not positioned straight up and down but are inclined at 20-some degrees with reference to the earth’s orbiting plane around the sun ? (If we keep time, i.e., rotation=day, revolution=year by solar cues, why shouldn’t we be inclined to do so also relative to space and position?)
Life should seem like a never-ending story always, but for most of us in our typical course of affairs it doesn’t seem so usually. Regularly this is due to the need to transact human affairs within the terms of commerce which our society has historically devised--a commerce which regularly extracts a compromise upon our individual vitality. This commerce is in its narrowest sense economic and in its broadest sense pseudo-psychic (the realm of product-culture and advertising). Its compromising extraction upon our individual vitality is also in its narrowest sense economic but in its broadest sense truly psychic. And there’s the rub: While modern society through its terms of fair commerce always strives and more-or-less achieves an economic quid-pro-quo, it invariably manages to short-change us with its barter in psychic surrogates. Take for instance, the "standard of living". In our society, the "standard of living" is typically gauged only in economic and not larger psychic terms. The "quality of life" is likewise market-assessed. But what standard, what quality has my life without love, and friendship, and self-respect? Not that they are otherwise unattainable, but how could life even be "good" without them? Modern myths persist as catalysts, but we are encouraged to buy into them literally--instead of figuratively, romantically, or psychically. For instance, the myth of Exploring as a genuine quest in life is commonly fed to us for consumption with the provision of truly powerful all-terrain vehicles (Ranger, Explorer, Grand Cherokee, etc.) which we then proceed to employ to "tame the wild highways." The myth of Security takes expression as the empire of Insurance which supposedly would rebuild everything even if the earth itself tragically shakes all to rubble (but for acts of God?) Rebuilding is good, no doubt, but what rebuilds the human spirit whose most common outlook reverberates as echoes of acquisition? The myth of Prophecy is provided us in terms of economic forecasts (the keenest of which, supposedly, are available only by subscription), an investing outlook which, though sometimes accurate within the constraints of its own bottom-line concepts, is nevertheless, short-range and narrowly non-evolutionary.
Yet we all live in an evolving world! More importantly, we are all beginning to experience, either cognizantly or otherwise, the evolution of the human spirit throughout the realms of our undertakings. And it is precisely the psychic component of our individuality that enjoys and engages in this truly human endeavor, the psychic component which is now here, not merely transformed, but truncated by modern commerce's psuedo-psychic extractions and provisions.
How have we come to tolerate this situation?
To the extent that we live our lives intending to be cooperative members of society, we naturally accept the notion of compromise. To wholly do otherwise is pure tyranny and to do so only grudgingly is, at best, ungracious brutishness. But though our naiveté and our general failing to take full responsibility for our world, we come not merely to accept the generally fair principle of quid-pro-quo economic compromise ( a wage for labor, a price for goods), but are led to accept a betraying compromise of the principle of compromise itself by a less-for-more provision of economically marketable surrogates for the true concerns of the soul. This carelessness puts us in terrible trouble. Until trouble towers far above our heads. Compromising the fair notion of compromise is tantamount to listening to the pronouncement of a liar that he-or-she lies: confusion reigns, what's to believe??!!
The task at hand, then, is not to abandon compromise as a fundamental underpinning of societal cooperation, but to reinvest it with its own intrinsic regulation: tit-for tat, this-for-that, sui generis. This gut-check is not a revolutionary but, rather, a quite though not quaint conservatory concept. Yet it is the essence of taking care, taking responsibility for the world. We should never be satisfied with compromising individual psychic goods (quality in living, provision as an outcome of inner vision) for anything less than commensurate socially-psychic (true community--not pseudo, surrogate artifice) arrangements. This correction constitutes a daunting task for us all, the kernel-core work of our evolution in the context of the human enterprise.
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