More and more of my daily diet of online perspectives consists of the panic/don't-panic debate. I enjoyed this lengthy excerpt from the comments section at thenewneo.com:
Arthur Koestler wrote about what he called the Tragic and the Trivial planes of life. As explained by his friend, the writer and fighter pilot Richard Hillary:
“K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.”
I think the attraction to ultimate catastrophes…whether the assumed flooding due to Climate Change, or the danger of America being taken over by the Ku Klux Klan, or the exaggeration of the very real dangers of coronavirus…is related to this. People who live entirely on Koestler’s Trivial Plane, looking for a little connection to Ultimate Things.
8 comments:
The cabal is panicking and trying yo push as many doomsday switches as they can find.
I told them that their dark gods had abandoned them. They were not the chosen rulers of the new world order.
They were deceived by satan and now they are stuck here, with me, when the sun resets via reboot and the earth is purged of evil.
If humanity is wise, the transition to a new world order will be relatively painless. If not... then know at least yhvh and the 9 of saturn wont allow thr human experiment to perish.
This place took too long to build.
You mean thenewneo.com, right?...there's actually a site called thenew.com, which shows as untrusted.
'twas my comment, and I think Koestler was really on to something. He wrote a lot more in expansion of the concept, including for example the hero's Night Journey....I'm planning to write a full post on this one of these days, when I have time and can retrieve the Koestler book that is now blocked by furniture and such.
Oh, gosh, I didn't even notice that it was your comment, David! Thanks. And I've fixed the "neo" reference.
These are significant steps:
https://twitter.com/lvnancy/status/1237740384383430657?s=21
But the big bottlenecks are in coordination:
https://twitter.com/man_integrated/status/1237461920678117378?s=21
That's a great thread on how emergency response works within our federal system. Thanks for that.
Oh, and the original post and David's comment- excellent. Evidence of the truth of this idea are everywhere in popular culture- extreme sports, the popularity of TV shows about things like survival skills and living in harsh environments like Alaska in largely traditional ways, etc. Modern prosperity strips much from us if we let it. For so many, trying to be in touch with it vicariously is all they have.
I've read the argument that some aspects of PTSD stem from the wrenching change from the emergency cameraderie of dancing-on-the-brink crisis to the workaday, isolating experience of ordinary life among semi-strangers. Never having been in anything like combat, all I have to go by is the odd letdown after 9/11, when we went back to bickering, or the compulsion I felt after the 2017 hurricane here to change my life and engage more fully in my local society. I'm somewhere off on the lefthand side of the scale on the spectrum of attachment disorders, so intimacy and meaning in human interactions come hard to me. That probably leads to an attraction to all kinds of theories of what circumstances cause people to bond more or less against their own wills: the lifeboat or SMOD scenario.
In the meantime, I've stocked up more than usual on dry goods, and my husband and I are a bit like Grim: we've been in training for extreme isolation our whole lives. I have practical reasons for going out, but almost no personal need to do it.
My head tells me this is not a very dangerous situation, but I can't deny the unease. It punches atavistic buttons.
Walter Miller, in his novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:
"The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for them, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they ' this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that man might hope again in wretched darkness."
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