Tuesday 9 June 2015

Time as a stream

Many intellectuals and creative thinkers go places that are deemed to be morally and mentally unhealthy by those trying to cling onto their sanity. I have been listening to videos describing narcissism and even though there is much truth to this, the definitions themselves, if they become too rigid, can lead people back to the rigidity of the psyche that in the end defines the narcissists preoccupation with gaining a stiff and closed system of control. People trying to escape narcissists end up back in the same cage, in this regard. In a way, this strikes me as people expressing a fear of the humanities, because the humanities is a field of speculation about reality, whereas those living in fear and in a defensive mode want all moral and ethical issues to be clearly delineated and defined so that they can remain safe. The reason I say this is I suspect that some experiences I delineate may seem evil and pathological to some people. For instance, having lost the past, I focus on the past in order to recuperate it. This is a feature of my having been traumatized by extreme historical rupture. It';s not that I am trying to impose the past on the people of the present, (which is what those who have been victimized by narcissists might feel), but that I am trying to impose historical awareness on the present, so that we may feel part of the fluid processes of history again. But this is difficult enough to do, because those who have been traumatized want to hold onto something like a definite firm barrier, over the stream, rather than being swept away by the stream. Time is a stream and it moves us along, but unless we reconnect with the past (the upper reaches of the stream), we are going nowhere. Fear keeps us frozen in one place.

 In Western society today, history itself is fundamentally pathologized. People simply do not have the coping mechanisms to take it in -- I mean the broad sweeps of history. They morally tut-tut about it, but they don't process history as part of everyday reality.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity