30/09/12

Pets and pests – and, in my lengthy experience, more pests than pets!

We're encouraged, not least by monotheism, to think of ourselves as having a unitary self, all-of-a-piece. But the evidence to the contrary, akin to the polytheism which preceded Judaic monotheism, is incontrovertible, as when one finds oneself seriously contradicting something one had said or thought before, though usually within a slightly or even substantially different context, taking a completely or partially different line of argument.

I believe the notion of a unitary self is a convenient over-simplification designed, with or without religious prompting, to paste over the cracks of disunity and uncertainty, if not moral contradiction, that are a daily occurrence. We all have two parents of opposite sex, which would in itself be grounds enough for contradiction or disunity, not to say mental ambivalence that sometimes spills over into ambiguity. But in back of the two parents are four grandparents, in back of them eight great-grandparents, in back of the eight great-grandparents sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on, with more and more differentiation the further back you go in ancestral terms. It may be we strive for a unitary self in the case of both personal and species specific evolution, if only to simplify things, but it would appear we are still some way from achieving it at this point in time, given the manifest contradictions which bombard us on all sides.

A unitary self within a democratic and/or plutocratic society is difficult if not impossible to conceive of, especially since choice breeds ambivalence and tends, rather, to encourage disunity within the put-upon individual, who then falls back upon the crowd, upon some kind of social or multitudinous support. If theocracy, when to any degree genuine, is more likely to encourage a unitary concept of self through God (monotheism), then it could be argued that autocracy, its alpha-oriented antithesis, is more prone to the encouragement of anti-self, meaning that which is anti-psyche and, indeed, anti-soul. But that would be to look at it from a standpoint theocratically orientated towards psychic self, not to allow for the other type of self which, being fundamentally female in character, is somatic and therefore bodily by nature, tending towards the concrete as opposed to the abstract. And it is precisely this type or manifestation of self that autocracy encourages!

Our age, being objectivist and feminist, remains somewhat partial to the somatic self, even as it embraces, through democratic and plutocratic alternatives to autocracy, a more ambivalent sense of self which may well arise from the interplay and/or alternations of soma and psyche, of female and male selves in perpetual conflict through the mechanism of choice. The triumph of psychic self, which is male, over both the somatic self of autocracy and the ambivalent selves of democratic and plutocratic liberalism is still, at this point in time, some way off, assuming it were possible through an ultimate theocracy (Social Theocracy?) that had the wherewithal to supersede both the world (of political and economic intermediate orientations, so to speak) and the netherworld (of scientific freedom) from a standpoint truly centred in otherworldly (religious) values, and therefore in the interests of 'Kingdom Come', as that which favours only the psychic self and requires, as corollary, the neutralization and subordination of the somatic self, a situation akin, it seems to me, to St George and the Dragon or, equally, to the lamb and the (neutralized) lion and/or wolf of Biblical metaphor, not to mention, more gender specifically, the crucifixional paradigm itself.

Such an advanced stage of life would most certainly have transcended the world, especially in its democratic (republican socialist) manifestation, and made life extremely difficult, if not impossible, for both netherworldly autocratic and worldly plutocratic societies, thereby serving to nullify them in the interests of an unequivocal commitment to otherworldly values premised upon the hegemony of metaphysics over pseudo-metachemistry, as of psychic self (male) over pseudo-somatic self (female), the free over the bound, the latter of which, through neutralization, would be obliged to 'lie down' with the former, a plane down from metaphysics in what has been termed pseudo-metachemistry.

Only thus can an evolutionary outcome favouring the establishment of a unitary self (One with God in Heaven) be guaranteed, and it will be as different from contemporary pluralism (in both soma and a limited degree of psyche) as, say, Judaic monotheism from Hindu polytheism, or Christian monotheism from pagan (Greco-Roman) polytheism. May it soon transpire!