Luther Blissett » Wed Nov 25, 2015 2:21 pm wrote:I was following the Occult Yorkshire thread in the beginning, taking vigorous notes to apply to a project, but stopped pretty early on when I started chasing too many subbranches to the subject. I'll pick it back up sometime.
But if you think that multiculturalism, independence from paternalist institutions, thinking about alternative and forward-thinking economic models, peace, and love of nature and planet are co-opted (is this what you mean by "incepted"?) by power, what do you like in the world? I think that each of these positive social changes bring us closer together and make us better inward/outward facing beings.
Making friends with people from other cultures, nations and backgrounds at the very least gives the individual the chance to gain greater empathy and knowledge and less desirable to compete, especially to the point of violence, with other humans. Rather than giving in to globalization, we could reject imperialism and those deeply-ingrained "othering" notions imposed upon us. Small children don't understand what's different about other children who look different until they're told. Abandonment of organized religion at least opens the individual up to seeking some kind of gnosis or deeper, hidden meaning regarding consciousness and the universe. Organized religion is a barrier to reflection on the self and life in the universe. Thinking about a different kind of future economy frees the individual to wonder why we need debt at all, to learn about scarcity and abundance, resources and the global power elite. This could in turn lead one on a spiritual quest, but at the very least, I can't see how a group looking to prevent embodiment would ever want people realizing how fucked they've been and organizing around constructive alternatives that reject the Graeber notion of "debt." Rejecting war and embracing peace seems to me like the very last thing planners want. Isn't war needed in order to make their world, capitalism run? I'm not talking about acquiescing to force, I'm talking about a future that wakes up to the fallacy of warcraft because there are dwindling numbers of them vs. rapidly accelerating numbers of "us", who can all communicate. Young people's attitudes about Iraq are telling in this regard. My stepdaughter's peers are far more antiwar than my peers were in high school. And they certainly don't want us thinking about protecting nature. Why would a planner pollinate that seed? What else is there besides spiritual reflection when we contemplate the earth?
No, I'm asking what you want to do about trans people. What do you want us to do about them?
That’s quite the challenge, LB. You’re gonna make me work for my lunch! To start with the last first, I don’t want you or anyone to “do” anything about “trans people,” because I’m neither interested in nor qualified for proposing social strategies. For one thing, any sort of social strategy I might propose, even if I was that way inclined, would have to then be implemented by existing organizations, which in my jaded view are already compromised, simply by being part of the social structures. Alternatively one could start an org, but this then becomes compromised for the same reason. Every group ends up working towards the opposite of its proposed ends, because the group’s survival depends on NOT achieving the very aims that define it. Hence you have the medical industry conspiring to make people sick, a legal system that protects criminals, and so on.
However, one thing that I hope has become clear, to anyone closely reading this thread, is that the transgender/postgender agenda is quite distinct from transgender individuals, at least to a large degree, i.e., that a vast proportion of the push behind trans/postgenderism is not coming from individuals who have or wish to transition (yet), and that an unknown percentage (based on Willow’s quoted article alone) of transgender individuals are not supportive of the trans/postgender push.
Imagine a very different sort of community in which individuals with especially marked confusion around their sexual identity were given the necessary space and compassion (and attention) to BE LIMINAL, that is, to remain essentially noncommittal about their sexual or gender orientation. An environment where there was no social pressure to fit in
at all (besides not being actively disruptive to the group).
How many individuals are now jumping aboard the transgender bandwagon because of a combination of the social pressure to conform in some way (the old world you say we are evolving past) with a more subtle pressure to conform to the non-conforming new identities that are being prepared for them, like commercial products that coincide with a cynical marketing campaign?
Simply put, the vastly increasing numbers of transgender-oriented individuals probably has nothing to do with a growing reality of transgenderism at a psychological or internal level, and everything to do with increased identity confusion combined with the ever-growing fear of being marginalized (because in liminal times, groups seek a scapegoat), further combined with ready-made identity-solutions that also happen to be means of vast profit for the ruling class and their corporations.
So when you say what would I have you do about the trans people, all I can say is, which one? The question suggests that they are a new species emerging among us. I don’t agree with that (though there is definite overlap with autistics, which is a form of neurodiversity). I think transgender is a way for social (and possibly biological) anomalies to reduce and contain their feeling of alienation by prematurely and over-literally identifying it in sexual, cultural terms, as relating to social identity, when social identity is the primary conceptual construct, whether it refers to “gender,” “race,” or “class” or all three.
What might someone struggling with an interior experience that doesn’t fit the social molds tell us, if we gave them the room to do so rather than dictating to them the terms of their own misfit-ness? (The same applies to autistics: the goal is always to cure, to socialize, to turn them into productive members of society, never to let them be and discover what they are.)
Regarding the other question, what do I like in the world? The easy answer would be “not much,” but it might give you the impression that I am a grumbling sourpuss who complains about everything, which is not really the case. I mostly enjoy being IN the world, and just do not enjoy it when the world tries to make me OF it. Besides superficial pleasures such as clean toilets, TV shows, and the local grocery store, what I like most in the world is encountering other sentient beings. I agree, personally, that there’s been enormous benefits from being able to travel and interact with different cultures and types of sentience. There’s no way I am advocating for a return to any sort of past social arrangement, and I am willing to allow that there are some improvements in our present way of life to that of a hundred or a thousand years ago (besides toilets and TV). I just can’t say with any certainty that these improvements have necessarily increased our chances, as individuals or collectively, of fully connecting to our interiorities, to our environment, and to each other at a meaningful level. It’s an impossible question, really. This is the world we have.
On the other hand, the prevailing ideology in the West is that the West is the Best, and that this is what progress looks like. And I don’t see any way to separate all of the good aspects of our western progress from the bad (which I do think vastly outnumber the good), or from the— apparently not just seriously advocated but quite viable— future of postgenderism, which I regard with unreserved horror. So overall, I have to say that things do not look good for us as a species, and that what might appear to be progress from a local standpoint, starts to look more and more like a diabolic soul trap the further you pull out (unless you pull out all the way to the milky way, at which point it starts looking pretty good again).
You mention peace movements and environmentalism. My grandfather, as you may recall, was very active in the peace movement in UK during the first half of last century, and I am 90% sure he was sincere. But, a) he was not a peaceful man himself, he was a bully; and b) there’s good reason to suppose that the peaceful protest template laid down in those days by Bertrand Russell and co (after Gandhi) may have been deliberately implemented by the ruling class in order to reduce incidents of violent revolt among the masses. That then leads to the possibility that the changes which were seemingly achieved via peaceful protest (such as under Gandhi in India) might have been changes that the ruling class had already accepted as inevitable (and maybe even desirable), and so were already willing to allow for ~ what
appeared to be ~ genuine social change for the good via the work of well-meaning individuals. Not saying it’s so, just that it can’t be ruled out.
Again, if all of these social and ideological changes are leading to postgenderism, that doesn’t seem like a positive outcome for humanity, does it? This doesn’t mean that some of us aren’t able to navigate the maze of deception and employ the many weird and unexpected perks of personal freedom and seeming self-empowerment for our eventual embodiment or individuation, like by participating in a rare sort of undirected think tank such as RI. That’s perfectly compatible with my own view, which is that the more totalitarian the world becomes, the less freedom there really is to even think, much less speak, one’s truth, the greater the opportunity that presents for us to reach inward, to the place where we can’t be controlled. It’s like God uses Satan for his herder. We only come to the truth of ourselves when all other avenues (avenues of identification) are intolerable to us, when nothing else fits but the soul. Hence what many would see as black pessimism, for me feels quite optimistic.
So the question of what to do with “these people” is the same as what to do with any lost soul (i.e., all of us): listen, connect, share as deeply as we are able, and only then consider the possibility (or need) for any sort of guidance. I don’t want to risk pontificating, but isn't the one thing that we really need (& also the only one thing that ever really helps) a working connection to our own sense of reality? Call it psyche or soul or intuition or God, once you have it, it doesn’t matter what you call it, and if you don't have it, no amount of
naming (or self-identification) is going to get it.
Ideology,
IMO, isn’t a means to establish a sense of reality, it's a really crappy surrogate for it, crappy most of all because it can be just persuasive enough to make us think we have found the real, and stop looking.
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
