The ‘Solway Statement’, revisited
Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2018 11:50 pm
The entire document is here.
The purpose of this review is to approach David’s statement from an angle that, as far as I am aware, did not receive attention in the numerous pages that ensued as David’s ‘accusations’ were contested by the local geniuses. My interest is in examining structures of belief and, as I have said in numerous postings recently, to attempt to notice and to describe how in a situation where a previous total metaphysic has collapsed — has slowly collapsed and continues to collapse — a dangerous psychic situation arises in which people experience acute *desperation* and are forced to arrive at conclusive views which aid them in holding their selves together in the face of an onslaught.
As a result of and a response to my encounter with the Genius Forum I have come to see my involvement here as, shall I say, necessary in the philosophical sense. If I use such a term I do connect it, loosely perhaps, with notions of ‘Providence’. That for me means that in the process of living life here in this plane of manifestation there are guiding powers difficult, perhaps impossible, to give name to. What I mean to say is that it had been ‘necessary’ as well as providential to have entered into a radically desperate space as I understand GF to be and to experience it as a manifestation of *nihilistic processes*, and processes of psychic dislocation, that correspond in some aspects to the strange movement in ideas that one discovers in the various conspiracy movements that have devloped mostly in the Postwar period.
To define that is to be able, dimly or clearly, to perceive it. And to perceive *it* would mean to have achieved a sort of fulcrum of perception; a position outside of the currents of shifting perception and fluctuating metaphyscs that has all of us in its grip. In order to have such a fulcrum of perception is to have available to one the perspective of a ‘master metaphysician’, yet I do not know of such a person and am making no reference to anyone specific. My object is simply to propose that such a position is possible and in this sense attainable. And further to propose that it is only attainable through study and familiarity with what I loosely call *our traditions*. Therefor, disconnection from our traditions is seen as erroneous, insofar as we are living and walking representatives of them, and that re-connection is required — not advised but required — in order to recover the distressed and desperate self from calamity. Thus ‘desperation’ and the extemist choices that seem necessitated by calamitous conditions is understood to be destructive and undesirable and, of course, to be resisted. I further assert that no one has any clear ideas how to recover the submerged self and that this is, to put it under a simple term, what *nihilism* is in essence.
What is horrifying to the geniuses is that the lens of view is turned around and that they are placed under that lens. In general their position is understood (by them) to be an ascendent one and to provide them with a Cat Bird’s Seat. The geniuses are the critics of all human social and civilizational processes and, by definition, stand outside of these, and having gained ‘true knowledge’ and having established themselves on that platform, pontificate to others, working to draw them in to accept what amounts to a specific religious position described not as such but as ‘reason’. It is safer to say that it is rationalistic but not necessarily reasoning. And therein is, as I see it, an essential core : this hard structure of view could be said to have more in common with cultic and conspiracist strategies than it does with the *real* traditions of Occidental reason. But I recognize the problematic in this statement.
_____________________________
In relation to David’s confrontation with Kevin, which would seem to have a certain commonality with ruptures within religious organizations or, as I suggest, within fringe and conspiratorial groups who struggle to make sense of their world when that world has become dangerous, I have extracted these comments:
Eric wrote: “As I see it, Trump is a demon that has taken solid form.”
David commented: “I think you're onto something here. Right from the beginning, there has been a very dark element to Trump’s candidacy, which has placed people under a spell. No matter how much Trump lied openly to people, or offended them with his crassness, or revealed how incompetent he was, or openly showed how fascist he was going to govern - no one seemed to mind. Indeed, it just made him even more popular. Only a demon has the power to do that.”
Diebert wrote: “As for American politics, to be honest I'm surprised you're engaged with the topic as much as you sound here.”
David responded: “I can’t ignore the signs. The end times are upon us. We have to prepare.” [Italics mine].
_____________________________
Obviously, it is necessary to see these statements in what I suppose is safe to call a ‘post-Christian context’. But this is part of what I find compelling and interesting about them, and then of course as GF as a manifestation of such post-Christianity. What that means, of course, is a condition that I describe as post-metaphysics or collapsed metaphysics. That is, the totality of the perceptual system seems to have collapsed — it is no loger *believed in* — but yet at the same time the general structure of the System is still there, functioning like a *ghost*. I propose that when one examines the entire perceptual world of the Postwar in the light of the conspiricist movement[s], one discovers that the Viewstructure is essentially intact but the elements and the terms of the narrative have morphed and expanded to include new and extraneous elements, the detritus, as it were, of modernity.
Therefor, when I say that man lives in and operates from a position within his *imagined world* what I mean is that each man is forced to articulate, consciously or unconciously, decisively or more as something received, his vision of The World, which means some level of description about how he came to be *here* and what he is to do here. The only place where this is done and can be done is in man’s imagined world. Certain of my references here have come from a reading of Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions of Contemporary America, and though I find that his approach is dismissive of some of the main elements of conspiricist thought (it could not be otherwise in a scholarly work published by a university press), I am definitely not one to simply dismiss conspiratorial notions. In fact it is quite the opposite. As an example I can arrive at no perceptual alternative but to understand 9/11 as a prime event of a conspiratorial nature, and my view is that it is quite rational to arrive at this conclusion if one examines the conventional narrative. But what is important to notice, and to state, is that it is not so much the initial perception (about a given conspiracy) that is *wrong* but rather all that accretes on it, over it, around it. It leads into a perceptual labyrinth where, it seems, the imagination becomes unhinged.
But since that ‘unhinging’ is part of my understanding of what has motivated our friends at GF, it becomes necessary to trace the unhinging back, causally, to a source.
Well, here you have my preamble. I asked David 2 or 3 times to define what he meant by End Times, and though I am sure that he read my request he declined to explain himself, likely because he saw that by doing so he would wind up in a difficult zone. It is an apocalyptic idea, of course, and it is not strictly Christian. The last Incarnation of Vishnu, Kalki, shares features with the vengeful returning God of The Revelation. But what I find interesting in whatever source of Apocalypse one recurs to is the idea that it is the metaphysics itself, the God of the way things Truly Are, who comes back with terrifying vengeance to *correct* the deviance and, essentially, to destroy the malefactor. It shoud go without saying that we are, indeed we are, in an emerging psychic battle in which these are the defining terms.
This is just the overt element in a perceptual and moral-hysterical critique of *Trump* who, let us be honest, is inflected with sulphuric odor. Perhaps he is evil, perhaps he is not, and this is not really what matters. What matters is the *space* where man’s imagined world takes place and, of course, what are the basic elements in his operational metaphysics.
The purpose of this review is to approach David’s statement from an angle that, as far as I am aware, did not receive attention in the numerous pages that ensued as David’s ‘accusations’ were contested by the local geniuses. My interest is in examining structures of belief and, as I have said in numerous postings recently, to attempt to notice and to describe how in a situation where a previous total metaphysic has collapsed — has slowly collapsed and continues to collapse — a dangerous psychic situation arises in which people experience acute *desperation* and are forced to arrive at conclusive views which aid them in holding their selves together in the face of an onslaught.
As a result of and a response to my encounter with the Genius Forum I have come to see my involvement here as, shall I say, necessary in the philosophical sense. If I use such a term I do connect it, loosely perhaps, with notions of ‘Providence’. That for me means that in the process of living life here in this plane of manifestation there are guiding powers difficult, perhaps impossible, to give name to. What I mean to say is that it had been ‘necessary’ as well as providential to have entered into a radically desperate space as I understand GF to be and to experience it as a manifestation of *nihilistic processes*, and processes of psychic dislocation, that correspond in some aspects to the strange movement in ideas that one discovers in the various conspiracy movements that have devloped mostly in the Postwar period.
To define that is to be able, dimly or clearly, to perceive it. And to perceive *it* would mean to have achieved a sort of fulcrum of perception; a position outside of the currents of shifting perception and fluctuating metaphyscs that has all of us in its grip. In order to have such a fulcrum of perception is to have available to one the perspective of a ‘master metaphysician’, yet I do not know of such a person and am making no reference to anyone specific. My object is simply to propose that such a position is possible and in this sense attainable. And further to propose that it is only attainable through study and familiarity with what I loosely call *our traditions*. Therefor, disconnection from our traditions is seen as erroneous, insofar as we are living and walking representatives of them, and that re-connection is required — not advised but required — in order to recover the distressed and desperate self from calamity. Thus ‘desperation’ and the extemist choices that seem necessitated by calamitous conditions is understood to be destructive and undesirable and, of course, to be resisted. I further assert that no one has any clear ideas how to recover the submerged self and that this is, to put it under a simple term, what *nihilism* is in essence.
What is horrifying to the geniuses is that the lens of view is turned around and that they are placed under that lens. In general their position is understood (by them) to be an ascendent one and to provide them with a Cat Bird’s Seat. The geniuses are the critics of all human social and civilizational processes and, by definition, stand outside of these, and having gained ‘true knowledge’ and having established themselves on that platform, pontificate to others, working to draw them in to accept what amounts to a specific religious position described not as such but as ‘reason’. It is safer to say that it is rationalistic but not necessarily reasoning. And therein is, as I see it, an essential core : this hard structure of view could be said to have more in common with cultic and conspiracist strategies than it does with the *real* traditions of Occidental reason. But I recognize the problematic in this statement.
_____________________________
In relation to David’s confrontation with Kevin, which would seem to have a certain commonality with ruptures within religious organizations or, as I suggest, within fringe and conspiratorial groups who struggle to make sense of their world when that world has become dangerous, I have extracted these comments:
Eric wrote: “As I see it, Trump is a demon that has taken solid form.”
David commented: “I think you're onto something here. Right from the beginning, there has been a very dark element to Trump’s candidacy, which has placed people under a spell. No matter how much Trump lied openly to people, or offended them with his crassness, or revealed how incompetent he was, or openly showed how fascist he was going to govern - no one seemed to mind. Indeed, it just made him even more popular. Only a demon has the power to do that.”
Diebert wrote: “As for American politics, to be honest I'm surprised you're engaged with the topic as much as you sound here.”
David responded: “I can’t ignore the signs. The end times are upon us. We have to prepare.” [Italics mine].
_____________________________
Obviously, it is necessary to see these statements in what I suppose is safe to call a ‘post-Christian context’. But this is part of what I find compelling and interesting about them, and then of course as GF as a manifestation of such post-Christianity. What that means, of course, is a condition that I describe as post-metaphysics or collapsed metaphysics. That is, the totality of the perceptual system seems to have collapsed — it is no loger *believed in* — but yet at the same time the general structure of the System is still there, functioning like a *ghost*. I propose that when one examines the entire perceptual world of the Postwar in the light of the conspiricist movement[s], one discovers that the Viewstructure is essentially intact but the elements and the terms of the narrative have morphed and expanded to include new and extraneous elements, the detritus, as it were, of modernity.
Therefor, when I say that man lives in and operates from a position within his *imagined world* what I mean is that each man is forced to articulate, consciously or unconciously, decisively or more as something received, his vision of The World, which means some level of description about how he came to be *here* and what he is to do here. The only place where this is done and can be done is in man’s imagined world. Certain of my references here have come from a reading of Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions of Contemporary America, and though I find that his approach is dismissive of some of the main elements of conspiricist thought (it could not be otherwise in a scholarly work published by a university press), I am definitely not one to simply dismiss conspiratorial notions. In fact it is quite the opposite. As an example I can arrive at no perceptual alternative but to understand 9/11 as a prime event of a conspiratorial nature, and my view is that it is quite rational to arrive at this conclusion if one examines the conventional narrative. But what is important to notice, and to state, is that it is not so much the initial perception (about a given conspiracy) that is *wrong* but rather all that accretes on it, over it, around it. It leads into a perceptual labyrinth where, it seems, the imagination becomes unhinged.
But since that ‘unhinging’ is part of my understanding of what has motivated our friends at GF, it becomes necessary to trace the unhinging back, causally, to a source.
Well, here you have my preamble. I asked David 2 or 3 times to define what he meant by End Times, and though I am sure that he read my request he declined to explain himself, likely because he saw that by doing so he would wind up in a difficult zone. It is an apocalyptic idea, of course, and it is not strictly Christian. The last Incarnation of Vishnu, Kalki, shares features with the vengeful returning God of The Revelation. But what I find interesting in whatever source of Apocalypse one recurs to is the idea that it is the metaphysics itself, the God of the way things Truly Are, who comes back with terrifying vengeance to *correct* the deviance and, essentially, to destroy the malefactor. It shoud go without saying that we are, indeed we are, in an emerging psychic battle in which these are the defining terms.
This is just the overt element in a perceptual and moral-hysterical critique of *Trump* who, let us be honest, is inflected with sulphuric odor. Perhaps he is evil, perhaps he is not, and this is not really what matters. What matters is the *space* where man’s imagined world takes place and, of course, what are the basic elements in his operational metaphysics.