Democracy in general has two natures: the respectable (its preferred image) and the violent. Without wiser heads to restrain it and direct it (something far too rare) – it usually ends up devouring its own people.

American politics at the present is not, strictly speaking, mob rule. But Americans are being led around by their noses, much like the domesticated beings they have become.

Meanwhile, unknown to practically everyone, Ortega y Gasset came up with the idea of mass man. It too made a big splash before dying away. Of the two thinkers, Buber is by far the most profound, and it has taken me a long time to appreciate his thinking.

For some people in some situations suffering can be instructive – and my life has turned out to be one of those situations – quite to my surprise.

My text for this morning is from Buber’s I and Thou, where he is ranting about the obsession with ordered process:

The dogma of a gradual ordered process is the abdication of humanity in the face of a burgeoning It-world. The name of destiny is abused by this dogma; destiny is no glass dome tipped over the top of the human world; no one encounters it except he who goes out into freedom. The dogma of ordered process, however, leaves no room for freedom, no room for its most real revelation, whose serene power changes the face of the earth: turning back. The dogma knows nothing of the human being who overcomes total struggle by turning back from it; who, by turning his back, upsets, rejuvenates, and transforms secure historical formations…

The belief in ordained fate is from its very inception a delusion. Considering anything as ordered process is only an ordering of that which is nothing more than a having-become of isolated world-events, of the physically present as history; the presence of the Thou,  the becoming that grows out of being bound is inaccessible to this perspective. This perspective does not know the reality of the spirit, and its scheme is not valid for the spirit…But the world of the Thou is not closed off. Whoever sets out for it, with his essence gathered together, with his resurrected capacity to relate, will become aware of freedom. And to become free from the belief in unfreedom is to become free.

Many people now sneer at the idea of spirit, and consider themselves too sophisticated for such an out-dated belief. And religious people are helping them with all their spirituality - and their disregard for advanced theologies such as Buber’s.

But a person without spirit is dead, is an It-person.

The American economy is not working, but Americans regard the economy strangely – as if it were something from another planet, perhaps – something that affects them (to say the least), but something they cannot effect in the least.

As I keep saying, over and over – we now have a society that is not interested in people – and in which people can barely exist. This drives me crazy, but no one else seems alarmed.

From the article:

But these days, we see a different kind of fear in the eyes of America’s entrepreneurs and professions. It’s a fear of arbitrary edict, of the brute exercise of power. And the origins of this fear lie in precisely in the fact that many if not most Americans can no longer count on open markets for their ideas and their work. Because of the overthrow of the anti-monopoly laws a generation ago, we instead find ourselves subject to ever more autocratic whims of the individuals who run our giant business corporations.

The equation is simple. In sector after sector of our political economy, there are still many sellers: many of us. But every day, there are fewer of them. Hence, they enjoy more and more liberty to dictate terms – or simply to dictate…

What is at stake is the survival of our democratic republic – a rush back into the feudal past.

The important thing here is the context in which all this happens – a world in which the people, as spoken of by Abraham Lincoln, no longer exist. The forces of which this article speaks are important. But an even more fundamental force stalks the land – the urge to destroy everything, including any people who are still left alive.

I continue with a paragraph from page 32, which gets to the core of the matter – but which will be incomprehensible to most Americans:

Today, our overlords not only refuse to defend the power they hold – they deny that it is even possible for any American to accumulate such power. And to make such an absurd claim stick, they (or the more politically sophisticated of the academic economists in their employ) have undermined our language itself.

Their most impressive act of lexical legerdemain was the coinage of various misnomers, some so audacious as to be worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Corporate monopoly? Let’s just call it the “free market”. The ravages of corporate power? Those could be recast as the essentially benign workings of “market forces”.

He goes on to explain what he means – and I hope you will read it, all you have to do is follow the link about, if you don’t already subscribe to the magazine.

He takes a pot-shot at Amazon, from which I buy lots of books. I have noticed some strange things going on there myself. It is distorting the market in some shocking ways – but gets away with it, since its inner workings are cleverly hidden from view.

Any large retailer does the same thing. Every week I do much of my heavy shopping at a Wal-Mart store at the nearest large town. I go there because of the many things I cannot buy in any local store, and their excellent customer service. But they are putting the squeeze on me, carefully raising their prices as much as they can get away with. And there is nothing I can do about it.

I have left the States, but I still live in its economy.

The goal of any organism (any living thing) is to be - to exist and develop its potential. But the way we are now is just the opposite – we are determined to not be and to destroy ourselves. This is the worst situation possible, and we refuse to acknowledge that it exists – at the same time as we rush ahead with our destruction. We confuse destruction with construction. And the worst of possible worlds with the best.

This process has continued for thousands of years (an eye-blink in real time) our insanity has now come home to roost – and we are eliminating ourselves. Perhaps the real world has had enough of us – and we (ever obedient) are destroying ourselves.

To put this another way, we were an experiment that failed. And in another million years or so another will be tried on for size.

To mass man, which is what we now are, this is incomprehensible. But for those who can comprehend the infinite, this is no problem at all – and our lives can go on, because we still have purpose.

I link to this article in the Times because it enumerates nicely the religions that appeared about the same time as Mormonism – the same time mass man made his fateful appearance. This was the most important event of our times – but it has not been noticed because the mass has no awareness, and no ability to notice anything. However, here is the summary:

It was precisely the founders’ religious tolerance that, over the years, has given rise to many new denominations and sects — particularly during the so-called Second Great Awakening, the 19th-century period of religious revivals that energized existing churches (including the Baptist and Methodist churches, bulwarks of today’s Bible Belt) and yielded new ones, including the Mormons.

In that era, it was a short step from feeling that one was possessed by God, as often happened at revivals, to feeling that one was appointed by God for a special mission. Joseph Smith Jr., who founded Mormonism after experiencing a vision of an angel, was among them.

But Smith wasn’t alone; many religious groups sprouted during the period. Like Mormonism, some were founded by people considered divinely inspired by their followers — for instance, Ellen G. White by Seventh-day Adventists and Mary Baker Eddy by Christian Scientists — while others, like Charles Taze Russell of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were admired for their charisma.

There’s plenty about these and other surviving Protestant groups that’s out of sync with mainstream religion. Christian Scientists, for instance, eschew doctors and medicine. Seventh-day Adventists have often set dates for the end of the world that have come and gone, while Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the doctrines of the Trinity and eternal punishment.

Even in my little town in Costa Rica these groups are active, and I am pestered by them frequently. I have noticed that their main appeal is the appeal of affluence – with the better-financed ones attracting the largest followings. Each, of course, claims to be the way, and is uneasy by comparisons of them to their competition. They prefer to shout down any thinking whatsoever – very much in the tradition of the Second Great Awakening.

The best thing about modern Christianity was its tolerance of scholarly criticism of itself. Something that never happened, to the best of my knowledge, in any other religion. The evangelicals reject this entirely and insist on a fundamentalism similar to that of the more conservative forms of Islam (which they hate with a passion). They are determined to turn the clock back and keep it there.

In fact study after study published during the 1990s, the heyday of trauma counseling, showed that early interventions were either ineffective or actually caused harm…Social psychology has a rich literature on group-building and social contagion that should have been well employed here…We gave them memories that they didn’t have…emotionally aroused people are suggestible…

It is a psychological truism that those who display dead certainty in their convictions are often hiding or covering up for deep insecurities…The 1990s was a period when our efforts to help other countries with money and aid began to seem impossible complex and fraught…The erosion of previous affiliations had not resulted in a vigorous individualism, but anxious insecure individuals.

The emergence of PSTD is a symptom of a troubled post-modern world…We now have a culture that has a deep suspicion of resilience and emotional reserve… Contemporary culture now emphasizes not resilience but vulnerability.
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To put it another way: we are not allowed to be – and this has provoked a violent reaction from those so deprived.

A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were “anxiety disorders,” including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); “mood disorders,” including major depression and bipolar disorders; “impulse-control disorders,” including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and “substance use disorders,” including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment—up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier.

What to make of all this? Perhaps we should acknowledge what we already know: that we have been overwhelmed by progress.

We already know this – but we also know we are not supposed to know this. Progress is our sacred cow, and must not be questioned. Let us be brave, however, question it anyway. The thought-police may come in the night and shoot us down – but that is the worst they can do to us.

But we do feel anxious, at least I do. We can put that down to one of the main categories: anxiety disorders - which no doubt includes the urge to rush on, and not waste our time on this.

Let us persist, and ask what is progress, anyway? It involves the feeling that we are not good enough, that we must become better. Right away, we bump into the Protestant Ethic, or the Work Ethic - anxiety in one of its purest forms. But one we feel is absolutely necessary (for progress to happen).

Perhaps my sophisticated readers will object to this, saying we left Calvinism behind long ago, and it is no longer one of our problems. But I think this would be a mistake. We have a new religion called business, and it makes the same demands on us – and even worse. It demands that we forget ourselves entirely and serve it completely.

For it, Armageddon is now. The world must be destroyed and rebuilt completely. How it would be rebuilt is not clear, but that is unimportant. The important thing is to destroy the world now – completely.

People have got the message – and are obeying it. They still believe in progress – but in its inverted form – which to our human minds (unchanged since the Stone Age) – this feels like the same thing.

This was not the speech we’ve been waiting for. From Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck, the conservative assault on Barack Obama comes down to this: Unfettered capitalism is true Americanism. Obama’s efforts to use government to make American capitalism more stable and more just constitute an alien imposition, hatched in foreign lands, and designed to make us less free.

Obama will either effectively answer that charge, or he will lose reelection. And he did not do so Tuesday night. Yes, he talked about government efforts to help improve American manufacturing, American education, American energy policy. But he did not use those proposals to make the essential broader point: that vigorous government does indeed represent true Americanism, because democratic government is the mechanism through which Americans come together to solve problems they cannot solve alone.

I’m not a big fan of The Daily Beast, but I think they got it right here.

Americans have become so stupid, even their president has become stupid – not something new, by any means – as I am learning from reading about Andrew Jackson.

This poem had an immediate, gut-feel for me – but I had to go to Wikipedia to see what it was about:

Thermopylae is primarily known for the battle that took place there between the Greek forces including the 300 Spartans and the Persian forces, spawning the famous epitaph beginning with “Go tell the Spartans“.

Fine, but what on earth does this mean to us now?

Honor is due to those who are keeping watch,

Sentinels guarding their own Thermopylae;

Perhaps I see myself guarding the future of the race, even though I know it has been betrayed.

I have a strong streak of grandiosity in my character.