Philosophizing With A Hammer: Smashing The Idols

Some Christian extremist has claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack that left over 90 people, including many children dead in Norway.  A war on Islam, he called it.  I guess the pressure of current events sent him over the edge.  An unfortunate consequence of collapse.  But the pressure cooker looks to continue folks, with a heat wave blanketing much of the homeland for the past week.   Yet, none of this has stopped the Senate Democratic Budget Chairman from telling us that “we, the people,” need to feel more pain financially so that Wall Street may keep prospering.

In the meantime the Greeks have been given the nod by the Euro-zone to default on their debt (well, sort of).  And the hardly-working folks at NASA are all kisses, hugs and uncertainty after they finished the final mission of their shuttle program (wonder what’s next for the empire!!).

And as jobless claims soared beyond expectations, topping a two-month failure in job growth, the Real News Network tells us that Obama represents the Wall Street arm of the Democratic Party.  Really, did they just figure that out?  Does the clown really think we are buffoons?

I am afraid to say that no matter which week it is my friends, the news gets more frightening and more revealing.  As the empire called Western Civilization goes down, people are getting crazier, and the soul of Gaia (Mother Nature) is focused on helping us along our long, insanely bumpy descent.  It is indeed curious how global warming is marching in lockstep with our global financial and psychological meltdown.  Is this not the perfect storm for imperial demise?  Meanwhile the banksters and the pols are seeking a cool get away.  Jim Kunstler was right last week; we are a dissolving nation.  But, it is not only our nation… it is the entire First World that is going down.  And this week we in the homeland, like those in Norway, can feel that dissolution, physically.

And why are we making such a big event out of Rupert Murdoch and the phone hacking scandal in England?  I mean hacking is now standard operating procedure in the USA by our own government.  It is called warrantless wiretapping, and it goes along hand-in-glove with Extraordinary Rendition.  I will tell you why.  Because they want to keep the Spectacle going to keep the masses confused and distracted from the fact that it is all a charade.  But soon the piper will come calling.  And all of us will pay.

But, my friends the stories we tell ourselves daily have a bad habit of shaping the way we see the world; they in fact create the world of our experience.  In the end, these stories – originally intended as hypotheses – become idols and take on a fixed and unalterable quality; they come to represent what we call concrete facts.  But this is precisely what we need to examine at our present juncture in history, when the idols we have collectively crafted have begun to crumble around our best efforts to save them, and the appearances they have constituted.

In The Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche taught “how to philosophize with a hammer” and smash our idols – by which he meant the assortment of stories that constitute the dominant representations of life and our world.  British lawyer and scholar Owen Barfield, born two years before Nietzsche’s death, was another idol-breaker.  In his work, Saving The Appearances: A Study In Idolatry (1957), Barfield takes up Nietzsche’s bold challenge.

I would like to propose that in light of the current trajectory of our global collapse – ecologically, politically, financially, psychologically and socially, we take Barfield’s work as the basis for a critique of those hypotheses that have become “untouchable” idols of the modern temperament and see if the possibility exists for reframing them in an attempt to change potential global outcomes.

[Sorry for the truncated post this week, but we are in the midst of travelling back to Siberia with our two-year old.  What a week it has been.]