The Nature of the Age. Every age has to go through itself in order to get beyond itself or, rather, in order that that which lies beyond it, whether as its confirmation or as its refutation, may come to pass. Today we are still in an age which, despite its technological sophistication and inventiveness, is fundamentally and almost inexorably sad. By which I mean that it is not a happy or contented or joyful age but one, on the contrary, in which the ego and the soul, as essentially male manifestations of psyche, are under assault from a variety of products and so-called services either rooted in or stemming from the cathode-ray tube and all that we would classify as the camera-based roots of contemporary society. To be sure, we now have the benefit of technological extrapolations from the older and more basic media which tend to confirm a devolutionary drift, not incompatible with the enhanced democratization of society, away from autocratic tyranny towards more people-based media or presentations of life in general. But, even with TFTs rapidly replacing CRTs, we are still caught up in the fundamental snag of contemporary civilization and its screen-oriented media. We continue, on an ever-widening basis, to stare at a variety of different screens, from televisions and computers to mobile phones and mp3-players, and therein lies our dilemma. For the more time you spend staring at screens of one sort or another, the sadder, in a correlatively proportionate manner, you become. And why? Because you are cultivating all that is most fundamentalist and even materialist in you under the aegis of the contemporary form of Devil the Mother (hyped, no doubt, as God), whose spectacular spell is extremely difficult to break even when it is not directly connected, as tends more usually to be the case, with film and thus with cameras. Never before has there been such pressure on people to conform to screen-based media; for where previously there may have been one or two alternative media to choose from, there are now literally dozens of competing media clamouring for our attention via the utilization of both eyes and ears alike. Some, of course, would interpret this as progress, not least technologically. Others, possibly older and wiser, would only see evidence of a kind of regression or, to resort to a term alluded to above, devolution. Few if any would, however, want to go back to the ‘good old days’ of CRT-dominated terrestrial television. Doubtless it is better that people should have more control over what they watch or what they use, media-wise, than simply be the passive victims of state-sponsored impositions from ‘above’. And yet, they are still watching and therefore staring at a variety of screens. They are still cultivating a vacuous approach to life in response to what has more often hailed, in light, from a vacuum, and they are still paying the price, not only financially, for behaving in such a sensually fundamentalist manner. Some of us are old enough to recall being told, as children, that it is rude to stare, especially at strangers, and that good manners demand that we mind our own business. Be that as it may, it is not only rude to stare at others; it is detrimental to one’s peace of mind and emotional well-being to cultivate the habit of staring at electronic screens, televisions and the like, for hours on end, as though one had no life of one’s own outside the media which have a kind of synthetic life which now dominates one and renders one an accomplice, by default, of their activities. And as all of us will know by now, rarely are those activities of a nature that one would associate with goodness or truth or virtue or reason. On the contrary, television in particular is the source of much that is morally dark and even plainly wicked, whether in relation to violence, language, sex, ambition, avarice, crime, or what have you. We become, if not careful, passively acquiescent in the most barbarously callous spectacles which glory in all that is ugly and false. And, after a while, we become desensitized to it to a degree which allows us to take it all for granted and more or less accept the inevitability of a stronger ‘fix’ of evil as a matter of course, things becoming more, not less, ugly and violent as commercially-driven free enterprise pursues its relentlessly brutal way in the interests of cultural credibility and economic viability. And even if we try to avoid as much of that as possible, still, even in front of a serious documentary or biography, we are still staring out of empty heads at the fruit of what cameras of one kind or another have provided. We are only comparatively less foolish for staring at good things than for staring at what is demonstrably evil in its barbarous ugliness. So there you are. This is the age we are living in and it is, to repeat, a sad age, governed, in no small part, by female criteria to an extent which has allowed freedom to become identified with soma at the expense of psyche and to exclude, as far as possible, any attempt to establish freedom on an alternative basis such that, when sufficiently independent of somatic subversion, would reflect the sensible lead of society by male criteria. And yet those of us who are male or sensible enough to require such criteria know that they can only be established at the expense of contemporary freedom and on the back of paradoxical elections, in certain countries, for religious sovereignty, so that we can begin to turn things around, not merely to attenuate or extrapolate from the most noumenally objective tyrannical roots, but to institute that which is most noumenally subjective and capable of standing up to and rivalling all that would constrain people to vacuous objectivity in front of a variety of electronic screens. For until we do, we shall not cease to be sad. Until the alternative is established, there will be no lasting contentment and therefore emotional fulfilment on the plane of joy for males and the loving approach to joy for females, never mind the truth and the beautiful approach to truth which are their intellectual concomitants and effective preconditions. At least we can be confident that the future will rectify, in its evolutionary thrust, all that the present leaves to be desired, turning us from ‘the without’ to ‘the within’ in the interests of self ... conceived, needless to say, in relation to psyche. But it will not happen without an immense struggle with the present, since the transformation from female-dominated to male-led criteria is not evolutionary but the consequence, if it happens, of an evolutionary alternative to the devolutionary norms which characterize contemporary civilization. They are two sides, if you will, of the same coin, but the heads side differs so markedly from the tails side as to portend an entirely different approach to civilization, the evolutionary progress of which can only triumph if devolutionary regression has been rejected and outgrown. It will be for the people to judge when and if such a rejection is to transpire, but it is what might be called the social theocratic leaders of the people who will have to encourage them in this respect if something more than a TFT-style reform of contemporary civilization is to emerge.