So I know this next post is supposed to be about Life-Logic, but I am still working on that. Hopefully it will be up next (there actually might be more than 2 parts to it and I can only vouch for the 2nd part as coming right after this one). This post is something related to part one that I thought I would post in the mean time.--I-P
I Think that so far, I have made it too easy to think of Alienated Phoniness as some kind of purely moral failing, something blameworthy. That would be a mistaken impression. I do think that there has to be a morality and some kind of moral freedom (at least at some point) involved in being in recovery from alienated phoniness, or in "choosing" (the quotes are there to reflect some ambivalence) to be in denial of the condition. And once in recovery, the condition of having to deal, as part of that recovery, in some compassionate and creative way, with the ubiquity of what I will here be calling "Technologies of Denial" in our sick culture is absolutely unavoidable. Still, the self or other blaming response is just another aspect of problem rather than a part of its solution. In this situation, the more we can acknowledge and make conscious the many different forms and patterns of symptoms of our shared suffering from the shared disease of sick culture, the more compassionate, rather than self righteous, we will become and the more inclined to heal ourselves and each other in a shared recovery process. In this post I want to try to contribute to this kind of possibility by using the physical (but also the psychological) condition of myopia and its "treatment" in the dominant culture.
I read a definition of the metaphorical meaning of the word "myopia" that said it meant or implied, among other things, " a lack of far-sightedness". Well, I think this would only really be true if "far-sighted" was being used to mean "healthy-sightedness", in which case why not use the word "near-sighted" to mean the same, unless appropriate "seeing far ahead" is being deemed intrinsically better than appropriate seeing of "what is near", by our collective unconscious. However that may be, what I want to affirm here is that "healthy-sightedness" both literally and metaphorically is the ability to properly coordinate that which is near with that which is far, with that which is in the mid-ground (and , I would venture to add, even with that which is in the imagination). It means not only to be able to "see the distant" but to see that distance in the context of the not so distant and the near, and like wise, healthy-sightedness means being able to see the near "in perspective"; in the context of he bigger picture and so of a deeper meaning. And it means having an inclusive fluidity of (relative) focus, so as to be able to move freely from near to far to middle distance etc and back as appropriate without getting caught in dissociation("staring"). Thus myopia as well as hyperopia (whether considered literally or metaphorically, are both variations on the same theme of "Dysopia" or dissociated, uncoordinated visual cognition, and healthy-sightedness is equally different from both of them.
Now, if you've read the previous post on "Life-logic" as well as others you will understand that general cognitive disorientation and dissociation is sort of the basis of sick culture and is implicated in just about all of its manifestations. Its obvious to me that "dysopia"(and particularly its myopic version) is thus a part of this dynamic both metaphorically and literally. Here I want to show that pathological socio-cultural conditions exist that encourage both metaphorical and literal "short-sightedness", and then add insult to injury by providing technologies of denial that allow one to "function" without healing the underlying condition, which is both internal, and external and which is left to keep on progressively degenerating.
The first on the list of outer conditions which encourage both literal and psychological myopia would be Slavery (and similar regimes of socio-economic coercion). Certainly the inherent violence of the "Master/Slave" relationship forces the slave into the myopic and narrow version of "sick-sightedness" since the slaves are obliged to follow orders about which they are not given the "bigger" picture; to "stare" at their work and evaluate it only in terms of uncoordinated, isolated, and usually external criteria of "efficiency" and the like. Superficially Hyperopia, (which is of course no healthier) would seem to be the more likely fate of the "Master" who allegedly is in charge, and has to be always looking to the future to plan the next move. However, if you examine this " distant future" that the supposed master is supposed to be responsible for, the "horizon" in question never seems either very distant or very broad. What we actually end up with in every coercion-based relationship, (and employer/employee, as well as Husband/Wife, in patriarchal societies and families are not to be excluded), is not so much a "Master/Slave" relationship but a kind of "hierarchy of Slaves", in which no one is really free to consider or act in terms of any defensible conception of the "big picture, whether dissociated or not.
I trace the reasons for this to the unavoidable Competition in such systems, which, among other things, tends to ensure that a real comprehensive, responsible attitude toward the future is not practically possible on anyones part because competition has a tendency to mutually enslave those who take part in it both to each others actions, and to certain short term considerations related to the necessity of winning or at least of staying in the game. To limit ones consideration of the future in such a way is to adopt a form of cognition no different then that of the slave since, of course consideration of at least a narrowly conceived future is equally possible even within the dissociated present which is forced on slave, as in the case of internal competition to please the master and rise in the hierarchy.
Thus, as I argue elsewhere; it seems better to abandon the concept of "master" completely in such a context and speak of a "Hierarchy of slaves", (or perhaps just of a "Culture of Slavery") since (at least for this purpose) one can easily consider the "Master" as just a high ranking slave in a delusional system in which "rank" is one of the delusions. You might say that "rank" helps facilitate the denial of the actual shared unfreedom and immaturity of the situation. I do think that, within such a system there is a useful distinction to be made between a slave and what I call a "conspiring captive" (this latter being a person who is conscious of being trapped in, but has not assimilated to, slave culture) but that is for another blog post.
So far, what we seem to have is a socio-economic paradigm that manifests a kind of continuum of various degrees of Myopia, but with Hyperopia nowhere to be found. Perhaps the hyperopic version of todays sick-sightedness, involves the kind exclusive devotion to a dissociated conception of the future that is the provence of those "visionaries" who are so besotted with their, usually one-dimensional and naive conceptions of future good, that they are effectively blind to the present "near" evil at which they daily connive and to which they daily contribute. Interestingly, competition is implicated here as well, in this case competition between the vision of such "jihaders" and that dominant one of the "McPeople" they are trying to destroy (though "Jihaders" in the sense I mean is a category that would not cover all the Hyperopic "futurists" by any means : see my old post "McPeople" here: http://healthyculture-piankhy.blogspot.com/2008/10/mcpeople-parts-one-and-two.html for more on this angle of social analysis) . One can see how such a hyperopic view would be an inevitable dialectical counter to the prevailing myopia, although (contra Hegel), its clear that nothing good is to be expected from either a combination of, or a battle between, two aspects of the same Dysopia.
But all of this has been much too metaphorical so far. What I am saying is that the epidemic of real physical eye-problems is in large part implicated both as contributing factor to, and as result of, our coercive, competitive and collectively dissociated and myopic socio-economic-politcal situation. Our culture has in the main created both the conditions of physical dysopia and means for its denial. Thus myopia usually starts in childhood as a result of stresses and "misuses of the self" (what the Alexander Technique folks would call the "end-gaining" of squinting, among other things) encouraged and faciltated directly and indirectly by our overstressed culture of alienated rituals oin inner and outer competition. Moreover, Glasses, and contacts (at least as they tend to be used) facilitate only a kind of Alienated, Phony Sight; Since the coordinated, fluid and holistic nature of Healthy-Sightedness (which of course mimics and supports the coordinated cognition discussed in the previous post) is emphatically not restored by prescription lenses or other such treatment, they result in the production of persons literally subjectively alienated from and numbed to, their actual visual (and likely general) disorientation/confusion in a way that not only encourages a perpetual denial (phoniness) as to its existence, but to its progressive worsening, rather than true healing. Simply removing ones own glasses will demonsrate this state of benumbed cognitive alienation and disorientation.
The Phoniness seems to be about an ego-based sense of "competence" (note the relationship with the word "competition"), that seems to be demanded as part of the competitve "public/private" life of such sick cultures as our own.
To make a comparison; Just as a person getting breast implants very much decreases the possibility of their growing out of a fixation with self-objectification and one-dimensional and just plain false standards of beauty,( at the same time as losing a great deal of sensitivity to the feeling in her own breasts), so glasses and the like (when not used as a supplementary part of an active practice of original vision recovery) similarly inhibit cognitive growth and the progressive recovery of a balanced coordinated form of cognition and experience of oneself and other. Moreover in competitive culture and economy, both these two kind of technical modification (as well as many many others I do not mention here), are likely to be motivated by the same pressures not to fail (and if possible to rise) in the hierarchy of Slaves-in-Denial alluded to above. And the decision may even be a very reluctant one. For example, maybe the breast implant is not the result of a willing assimilation to a phony conception beauty, but a reluctant concession to a "need" to stay "competitive" in the socio-erotic "market" (or if you happen need to keep your job at the strip club, the real job market as well). And of course no one likes getting glasses or contacts (worst of all) eye surgery).
The problem I want to get at here is that the same sick culture usually provides (due to a myopic and uncoordinated path of technological innovation) the means, not to heal the disorders it produces and reinforces but, (through various forms of formal and informal Miseducation), to repress and deny both the symptom and the disease, which thus only gets progressively worse. I suppose you could call such technology the Technologies of Denial, (here in a medical manifestation).
I also want to call such technologies Malignant Technologies* in the sense (which I will explore in a future post) that it is possible to understand the replication of healthy culture in general as like that of healthy biological tissue; that is, as something involving the "education" of cultural "stem cells" (young people) into the status of mature cells fulfilling their intended (and so meaningful) places in the living "tissue of reality". This process being analogous to the way that stem cells replace dying cells in a living body. Clearly cultural malignancy happens when an educational (we could also call it "initiatory") process that successfully manages this transition is replaced by one that (in the short term) seems to allow the cells to avoid this kind of growing up indefinitely, with the help of technologies of denial. In short, cancer cells are immature confused, dissociated, damaged, alienated from their purpose and place within the larger organism, as well as, being presumably unconscious and "in denial" of these things. Historical humanity, including its denial-facilitating technical infrastructure, could be described in exactly this way.
And it really seems to be the unconsciousness/denial that makes for the malignancy (though it seems that competition in various forms makes for much of the denial). This bringing together of Unconsciousness and Denial is a strange thing on the face of it since it is hard to see how you can be in denial of something of which your are unconscious. This gets back to the ambiguous feelings about the moral aspect of this whole situation that I brought up at the beginning. I think there is some resolution of the issue in the realization that "consciousness is consciousness of togetherness" and that no one is absolutely unconscious, and so the choice always exists to be open to greater inclusivity of meaning, or to be closed to it in principle (usually because of some intuited fear that such openness would disturb ones inner or outer status quo or otherwise challenge ones status or self-conception relative to others). Denial then would be a kind of fear-based siding of the emotions with the seeming security ofthe status quo against expanded consciousness, probably in response to the competitive and alienated context which informs everything in this culture. So such a competitive culture selects for denial, alienation, and phoniness , both in terms of the malignant technologies of denial that thrive in it and in terms of the phony and alienated social relationships it fosters.
This relationship aspect deserves more comment. Generally speaking friendships, partnerships, social circles are not conscientious, soulful associations dedicated to the compassionate work of inner and outer healing. People are not coming together in an inclusive and non-alienated spirit to help each other and the world recover from our shared sick culture and from the specific individual forms of Alienated Phoniness this takes in each each of us. Rather people tend to come together in basically dissociated, exclusive in-groups in which the tacit intention seems to be establishing and maintaining (or just assuming) some sense of superiority over those excluded, largely through what amounts to the the tacit denial of everyones equal and shared participation in the very sick, dissociated, culture that such associations exemplify and that I am trying to get across in this blog.
In this connection I can't resist mentioning the "logical technique" of "Invidious Comparison" by which this is collusive denial is usually facilitated (more of this and other "Life-Logical fallacies" in future life-logic posts). The formula is essentially "A" is good (and so does not have to change) because "A" is better than "B". Of course even If it were true that A were "better" than "B" in a given respect or even in every conceivable respect), it would not mean that A is Good. Before the concept got subsumed into the competitive paradigm, something was Good because it helped other things (indeed every other thing) be Good, more whole, more itself, rather than because it surpassed them. Unlike "better-ness" or "best-ness, Goodness does not presume some kind primary alienation, exclusion, or zero-sum competition. If A is a good A it would be because it helps B be a good B and visa versa. Goodness, like Truth, Beauty, etc, implies an inclusive, non-alienated, holistic, healing quality and emphatically does not belong at the beginning of any list which includes "better" and 'best" in our ordinary sense of those words, which take their essence from a sort one-dimensional, narrow (myopic), and usually linear framework. Socially speaking, such an invidious confusion of better-ness with goodness, translates in to "We are good and so can afford to be complacent, because we are better than "They" (in this or that respect which WE are sure is decisive), and thus our closeness to each other is more or less based on our alienation from outsiders and on our denial of our shared disease of alienated-phoniness, however different our symptoms may be from those of others. Moreover in such a model "they" (that is , those in group B), have just as much a claim to complacency and rightousness vis-a-vis some carefully chosen group C as A might claim toward them, and C of course will choose its own object of invidious comparison and so on and so on...In the light of ongoing entropy, what can this be but a shared dynamic of mutual degeneration cultural erosion?
Of course the point would not change anything essentially to reverse things and replace collusive and alienated shared complacency with equally alienated and misbegotten sense of inferiority, shame, envy and "ambition", as that would if anything only accelerate the same delusional, disintegrative, "synentropic" process. It is as though we were all different particles of soil on an eroding hillside; complacency does nothing to slow or stop the ongoing erosion and a general competitive scramble to be higher up the hill, let alone "King of the Hill" would make things worse.
What I am trying to do with these blogs it to facilitate ways for everyone (including myself) to sustainably reverse this underling competitive (alienated) dynamic of denial-enabled cultural erosion in ourselves and each other--and so "build healthy cultural soil" together---in a way that is genuine, balanced and so avoids becoming simply another form of competitive alienation (for example in the "less-alienated-and-phony-than-thou" sense). This is why I want to be clear that accepting that (like everyone else), one suffers from and is involved in one way or another (actually in many, many ways) with the technology of denial (whether or not this is explicitly medical), is the most important aspect of recovery from it. After all, this acceptance--which is more like an insight or act of comprehension--is obviously already a breach in the very regime of denial and mutual alienation the Technology of Denial itself exists to maintain, and so is also a sign of a present and potentially ongoing recovery of the health and sanity.
Moreover, once this sophisticated; (shameless/prideless, yet inwardly and outwardly compassionate, committed, and resolute) attitude of recovery is awake in us, it is sometimes even possible, to use or modify the technology itself in such a way that it does support healing. For instance, with regard to glasses, there are various ways to limit the use of the glasses or contact lenses to when it is really necessary, while practicing vision exercises like the Bates Method when not using them. There is even a paradoxical use of lenses (a series of increasingly strong reading glasses for Myopes for example) which, when used properly and combined with other things, works to reverse the degenerative effects of normal glasses.Such Technologies might be called soft technologies or "Technologies of Recovery" rather than of Denial (I also call them Coremissive Technologies, but more on that later ). Of course such technologies can only be really technologies of Recovery if they are coordinated with a general culture of recovery; otherwise another pattern of denial (perhaps a more "new-agey one) is likely to replace the old one.
Now | want to be very clear here; What I am saying is that the conditions of our culture make a persons suffering from one or another form of psycho-physical disorder inevitable, whether this is obvious or not. It is a sick culture and it does not produce healthy people (it does not even produce healthy conceptions of health). No one is born with or allowed to acquire, enough critical distance to escape some form or other of the alienated cosmology, identity politics, and rituals or our culture, even if these were not inextricably mixed up with an equally alienated and toxic physical infrastructure to which we are all forcibly exposed. This situation being universal, the more obvious any given persons particular "pattern of trauma" is the better, in as much as it becomes that much easier to acknowledge and treat.
What I am getting at is that I don't want anyone to feel guilty or ashamed for wearing glasses (or having breast implants, or being involved in any other the myriad heads of the hydra of sick culture) anymore than I want anyone to feel proud for not doing this or that particular thing. Pride and Shame are themselves forms of denial, and trying to perfectly address (or even assess) this or any particular aspect of sick culture in isolation would itself be a psychologically myopic move, as though curing this specific symptom would actually cure, rather than potentially strengthen (by strengthening denial), ones underlying disease of sick culture. It might not even make sense, in a given situation, to make this area visual cognition a priority in ones process of recovery (though making a beginning--since this is so easy to do seems like a good idea so long as its coordinated with a general process of recovering from sick culture as a whole).
To try to give more of an example of what mean, I will use myself: I, who am also physically myopic to a certain vary variable extent, do some and have done all of the above mentioned coping/recovery work with glasses and without them. I don't wear glasses these days, (though I would if I really needed to for a specific limited purpose). I do eye exercises when I think of it but I can be a slacker at it. I listen to a lot of books with Text-to-speech on an ebook thing to spare my eyes, though I still probably read too much and not always in the best "Alexander Technique" way. Most of the time I feel that I am at least not going backward in this area. This is actually pretty good, almost ideal really, since there are so many other aspects of sick culture that I ( like everybody) suffer from and have to deal with. Going off the deep end about getting "perfect sight" would likely just mean a failure to "coordinate my problems", with the ultimate effect that this particular symptom would be gone (at least temporarily) while various others, and worst of all, the actual underlying disease, will have only been strengthened (perhaps I would become "big headed about my sight, my cognitive myopia having ironically gotten worse while I myopically fixated on "conquering" my physical myopia). Things could always change of course but for the time being at least I am happy with the state of coordination of this part of my recovery process with rest of it. I see "very well" some of the time, not so well some of the time and fair-to-middling most of the time. The main thing is for me to not be in denial about this general state of affairs or about the state any other symptom of my own sick culture and to do the best I can not to either over-fixate on it or neglect it all together. Having as little recourse to the relevant technology-of-denial as practicable (glasses in this case) actually facilitates the "minimizing neglect" part because my state of seeing itself tells me when I have been too lax in my "healthy-sightedness" practices and in general need to step things up in this area relative with other things, at least for a while. The main thing is to keep working on the disease while I keep all the various symptoms attended to best I can in a way that is coordinated with and facilitates that work; to keep everything more or less progressing in a coordinated way both in terms of my inner relationship with myself as an "Individual" and my outer relationships with others as a "Person"...
Again: the general situation of being sufferers of sick culture, whether we suffer from actual physical dysopia or not, is universal; as I have tried to show above, Invidious comparisons are themselves an aspect of that culture, and any sense purity or righteousness is just a form of denial and bad taste. But the same is true of any sense of shame. We all have Individual physical, (inner animal), emotional (inner child), mental (inner adult) and psychological (inner elder) problems to discover and coordinate (through inner and outer "co-inference") with Personal (Familial, Local, Civil, and "Religious") problems. Only by doing so is there any hope of sustainable and progressive (real) healing for anybody (see the epigraph of the previous post about cognition).
I may not have sufficiently proven the claims of the the above paragraph to you so far (though, If you have read the last 4 or 5 of these posts I am not sure why not, and would be interested to receive your comments on the matter). Anyway, I think if you keep reading this blog you will be convinced eventually.
So; conclusion: I have used as my main example the technology and culture of glasses (and their dissociation-and-denial-facilitating effects), rather then more obvious technologies of denial like the use of Alcohol and a host of other legal and illegal drugs, just because the glasses business is clearly such an "innocent" thing. All the others are also essentially innocent in the same way, but the fact that no one asked to be so systematically deprived of necessary love and affection during critical development years that the only way they can experience something that feels like a genuine hug is through an external chemical substitute, is, evidently, less easy to see then the fact the no one deliberately abuses their eyesight in order to become addicted to another substitute technology-of-denial like glasses/contacts/surgery that also worsens, rather than addresses the original condition and its causes. On the other hand I think part of me also wants to scare you a little, as I have recently been scared, with the situation of ever increasing myriads of morally, intellectually and physically myopic "educated" professionals, specialists, managers, and "efficient" workers (all equally proud of being thoroughly "detail oriented" and equally oblivious of any inability to put those details in proper perspective or single out the truly relevant ones), so adapted to the hierarchy of slaves and the culture of denial as to be unable to conceive of anything else, running around in charge things. Of course, things have pretty much been that way since even before what we call civilization. The fact that in our time the situation seems to have hyper-metastasized, is not cause for panic, but, hopefully thinking about it will give you some sense of urgency about this whole sick culture/healthy culture thing.
*note: I usually use the word "Comalignant" to stress the two-fold (inner/psychological as well as outer/social) nature of the pathology of sick culture I am describing, just as I use the word "Coremissive" (as well as "Cointegrative"), to describe the culture of recovery (healthy culture), when looked at from this point of view. I didn't in the above sentence because I thought introducing such a neologism at that time would be unnecessarily distracting in that particular place....I'll say more about such things later...
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Postscript
Ever since writing this post I have felt that, because I so wanted people not to become psychologically myopic in thinking about their physical myopia, I down played the effects of the latter--and so the need to begin addressing--it a bit too much. Its a tricky balancing act I am trying to manage in addressing this kind of thing at all, but when you consider how much vision figures in brain and mind functioning in general, its not something I want to under-emphasize.
Since its been quite a while since I researched the topic, I wanted to finish the the book "Conscious Seeing" by Roberto Kaplan, (as well as another similar book, ) before adding this postscript, but other things seem to be supervening, and I think I can ease my conscience about it just by exploring the implications of what I have read so far.
Kaplan says that glasses and contacts have the effect of deferentially focusing light directly on the fovea centralis to compensate for the eyes inability to do this properly and in a balanced way. The fovea centralis is the most acutely "analytical" part of the retina, whereas the rest of the retina tends toward the more diffusive and field-like (corresponding to right-brain functioning).
This makes me suspect that glasses and contacts etc might facilitate that kind of either/or "panic-logic" that the culture is informed by, through (among other things) dissociating right brain and left brain thinking. My guess is that correspondingly, thinking and feeling are likely to become more dissociated from each other and less nuanced and flexible in themselves, so that a person under the influence of this sort of technology might have a tendency both to look at things in black and white ways, and/or to flip-flop between being over emotional (sentimental) and over intellectual (coldly calculating or excessively abstract). Of course this itself is an oversimplification of the actual kind of imbalance that is likely to result in a real person. Nevertheless, I suspect that, in a lot of people who have been wearing glasses most of their lives, the brain circuits will have been assimilating to the this one-sided effect of the lenses, (as well as to the subliminal emotional effect of the constant stress in the eyes that has to be there in order to maintain the exact degree of refractive error the glasses are prescribed to correct for), and that they are likely to think that the above mentioned, (or any similar) tendencies of thought and feelings they might have are either just a natural part of their character or something that just reflects reality ("feelings are usually opposed to thoughts--thats just the way it is").
All of this seems to me a big deal because, if one is making decisions and interpreting reality and information in such a dichotomized, uncoordinated, insufficiently nuanced or graduated way because of ones mind/brain's subconscious assimilation to an unhealthy technology, its going to be hard to sustain a balanced view of the importance of that very problem (as well as any other problem really). Either one will over emphasize the problem (and so abandon any attempt to deal with it--and our sick culture in general-- as hopeless) or one will under under emphasize it (since it is only one of a myriad of technologies and infrastructures of denial in a culture full of them and can therefor, presumably wait indefinitely to be addressed).
Although it is true that the culture is full of technologies of denial, (I would even say that it is a good rule to assume any technology, or ritual of the dominant culture to be at least partly guilty until proven wholly innocent), it seems that the ones that effect the mind itself--and so the powers of discernment-- in a constant and ongoing (and likely degenerative) way need to be singled out for special recovery measures for that very reason. Of course almost any psycho active drug that is used daily ( or at such a frequency that there is no time to for its effects to really wear off) is in this same category. And also, there are certain ritual and infrastructures of apartness which, in future posts, I will argue are similarly crucial to begin to address for similar reasons.
I want to emphasize the word "begin" in the previous sentence, since that is all I am taking about really. There is no idea of having to ever "having dealt with" any of aspect of sick culture in the sense of having achieved perfect state of achievement or whatever. That would very probably be a bad sign itself for many reasons, some of which I've already gone into. One begins....One begins again. In general the culture of recovery is pretty comic in spirit, full of back-slidings, errors, failed experiments etc...there are no ranks or grades and its the farthest thing from feeding the ego or any egoic sense of "righteousness" of any kind. Its like a kind of progressive balance between balance and imbalance itself, in which the one can only be maintained by constantly acknowledging and being sensitive to presence (manifest or not yet manifest), of the other.... the kind of thing that, when you're doing it right, the process itself is its own reward, (which is great because, as I say, the process is endless....)
I Think that so far, I have made it too easy to think of Alienated Phoniness as some kind of purely moral failing, something blameworthy. That would be a mistaken impression. I do think that there has to be a morality and some kind of moral freedom (at least at some point) involved in being in recovery from alienated phoniness, or in "choosing" (the quotes are there to reflect some ambivalence) to be in denial of the condition. And once in recovery, the condition of having to deal, as part of that recovery, in some compassionate and creative way, with the ubiquity of what I will here be calling "Technologies of Denial" in our sick culture is absolutely unavoidable. Still, the self or other blaming response is just another aspect of problem rather than a part of its solution. In this situation, the more we can acknowledge and make conscious the many different forms and patterns of symptoms of our shared suffering from the shared disease of sick culture, the more compassionate, rather than self righteous, we will become and the more inclined to heal ourselves and each other in a shared recovery process. In this post I want to try to contribute to this kind of possibility by using the physical (but also the psychological) condition of myopia and its "treatment" in the dominant culture.
I read a definition of the metaphorical meaning of the word "myopia" that said it meant or implied, among other things, " a lack of far-sightedness". Well, I think this would only really be true if "far-sighted" was being used to mean "healthy-sightedness", in which case why not use the word "near-sighted" to mean the same, unless appropriate "seeing far ahead" is being deemed intrinsically better than appropriate seeing of "what is near", by our collective unconscious. However that may be, what I want to affirm here is that "healthy-sightedness" both literally and metaphorically is the ability to properly coordinate that which is near with that which is far, with that which is in the mid-ground (and , I would venture to add, even with that which is in the imagination). It means not only to be able to "see the distant" but to see that distance in the context of the not so distant and the near, and like wise, healthy-sightedness means being able to see the near "in perspective"; in the context of he bigger picture and so of a deeper meaning. And it means having an inclusive fluidity of (relative) focus, so as to be able to move freely from near to far to middle distance etc and back as appropriate without getting caught in dissociation("staring"). Thus myopia as well as hyperopia (whether considered literally or metaphorically, are both variations on the same theme of "Dysopia" or dissociated, uncoordinated visual cognition, and healthy-sightedness is equally different from both of them.
Now, if you've read the previous post on "Life-logic" as well as others you will understand that general cognitive disorientation and dissociation is sort of the basis of sick culture and is implicated in just about all of its manifestations. Its obvious to me that "dysopia"(and particularly its myopic version) is thus a part of this dynamic both metaphorically and literally. Here I want to show that pathological socio-cultural conditions exist that encourage both metaphorical and literal "short-sightedness", and then add insult to injury by providing technologies of denial that allow one to "function" without healing the underlying condition, which is both internal, and external and which is left to keep on progressively degenerating.
The first on the list of outer conditions which encourage both literal and psychological myopia would be Slavery (and similar regimes of socio-economic coercion). Certainly the inherent violence of the "Master/Slave" relationship forces the slave into the myopic and narrow version of "sick-sightedness" since the slaves are obliged to follow orders about which they are not given the "bigger" picture; to "stare" at their work and evaluate it only in terms of uncoordinated, isolated, and usually external criteria of "efficiency" and the like. Superficially Hyperopia, (which is of course no healthier) would seem to be the more likely fate of the "Master" who allegedly is in charge, and has to be always looking to the future to plan the next move. However, if you examine this " distant future" that the supposed master is supposed to be responsible for, the "horizon" in question never seems either very distant or very broad. What we actually end up with in every coercion-based relationship, (and employer/employee, as well as Husband/Wife, in patriarchal societies and families are not to be excluded), is not so much a "Master/Slave" relationship but a kind of "hierarchy of Slaves", in which no one is really free to consider or act in terms of any defensible conception of the "big picture, whether dissociated or not.
I trace the reasons for this to the unavoidable Competition in such systems, which, among other things, tends to ensure that a real comprehensive, responsible attitude toward the future is not practically possible on anyones part because competition has a tendency to mutually enslave those who take part in it both to each others actions, and to certain short term considerations related to the necessity of winning or at least of staying in the game. To limit ones consideration of the future in such a way is to adopt a form of cognition no different then that of the slave since, of course consideration of at least a narrowly conceived future is equally possible even within the dissociated present which is forced on slave, as in the case of internal competition to please the master and rise in the hierarchy.
Thus, as I argue elsewhere; it seems better to abandon the concept of "master" completely in such a context and speak of a "Hierarchy of slaves", (or perhaps just of a "Culture of Slavery") since (at least for this purpose) one can easily consider the "Master" as just a high ranking slave in a delusional system in which "rank" is one of the delusions. You might say that "rank" helps facilitate the denial of the actual shared unfreedom and immaturity of the situation. I do think that, within such a system there is a useful distinction to be made between a slave and what I call a "conspiring captive" (this latter being a person who is conscious of being trapped in, but has not assimilated to, slave culture) but that is for another blog post.
So far, what we seem to have is a socio-economic paradigm that manifests a kind of continuum of various degrees of Myopia, but with Hyperopia nowhere to be found. Perhaps the hyperopic version of todays sick-sightedness, involves the kind exclusive devotion to a dissociated conception of the future that is the provence of those "visionaries" who are so besotted with their, usually one-dimensional and naive conceptions of future good, that they are effectively blind to the present "near" evil at which they daily connive and to which they daily contribute. Interestingly, competition is implicated here as well, in this case competition between the vision of such "jihaders" and that dominant one of the "McPeople" they are trying to destroy (though "Jihaders" in the sense I mean is a category that would not cover all the Hyperopic "futurists" by any means : see my old post "McPeople" here: http://healthyculture-piankhy.blogspot.com/2008/10/mcpeople-parts-one-and-two.html for more on this angle of social analysis) . One can see how such a hyperopic view would be an inevitable dialectical counter to the prevailing myopia, although (contra Hegel), its clear that nothing good is to be expected from either a combination of, or a battle between, two aspects of the same Dysopia.
But all of this has been much too metaphorical so far. What I am saying is that the epidemic of real physical eye-problems is in large part implicated both as contributing factor to, and as result of, our coercive, competitive and collectively dissociated and myopic socio-economic-politcal situation. Our culture has in the main created both the conditions of physical dysopia and means for its denial. Thus myopia usually starts in childhood as a result of stresses and "misuses of the self" (what the Alexander Technique folks would call the "end-gaining" of squinting, among other things) encouraged and faciltated directly and indirectly by our overstressed culture of alienated rituals oin inner and outer competition. Moreover, Glasses, and contacts (at least as they tend to be used) facilitate only a kind of Alienated, Phony Sight; Since the coordinated, fluid and holistic nature of Healthy-Sightedness (which of course mimics and supports the coordinated cognition discussed in the previous post) is emphatically not restored by prescription lenses or other such treatment, they result in the production of persons literally subjectively alienated from and numbed to, their actual visual (and likely general) disorientation/confusion in a way that not only encourages a perpetual denial (phoniness) as to its existence, but to its progressive worsening, rather than true healing. Simply removing ones own glasses will demonsrate this state of benumbed cognitive alienation and disorientation.
The Phoniness seems to be about an ego-based sense of "competence" (note the relationship with the word "competition"), that seems to be demanded as part of the competitve "public/private" life of such sick cultures as our own.
To make a comparison; Just as a person getting breast implants very much decreases the possibility of their growing out of a fixation with self-objectification and one-dimensional and just plain false standards of beauty,( at the same time as losing a great deal of sensitivity to the feeling in her own breasts), so glasses and the like (when not used as a supplementary part of an active practice of original vision recovery) similarly inhibit cognitive growth and the progressive recovery of a balanced coordinated form of cognition and experience of oneself and other. Moreover in competitive culture and economy, both these two kind of technical modification (as well as many many others I do not mention here), are likely to be motivated by the same pressures not to fail (and if possible to rise) in the hierarchy of Slaves-in-Denial alluded to above. And the decision may even be a very reluctant one. For example, maybe the breast implant is not the result of a willing assimilation to a phony conception beauty, but a reluctant concession to a "need" to stay "competitive" in the socio-erotic "market" (or if you happen need to keep your job at the strip club, the real job market as well). And of course no one likes getting glasses or contacts (worst of all) eye surgery).
The problem I want to get at here is that the same sick culture usually provides (due to a myopic and uncoordinated path of technological innovation) the means, not to heal the disorders it produces and reinforces but, (through various forms of formal and informal Miseducation), to repress and deny both the symptom and the disease, which thus only gets progressively worse. I suppose you could call such technology the Technologies of Denial, (here in a medical manifestation).
I also want to call such technologies Malignant Technologies* in the sense (which I will explore in a future post) that it is possible to understand the replication of healthy culture in general as like that of healthy biological tissue; that is, as something involving the "education" of cultural "stem cells" (young people) into the status of mature cells fulfilling their intended (and so meaningful) places in the living "tissue of reality". This process being analogous to the way that stem cells replace dying cells in a living body. Clearly cultural malignancy happens when an educational (we could also call it "initiatory") process that successfully manages this transition is replaced by one that (in the short term) seems to allow the cells to avoid this kind of growing up indefinitely, with the help of technologies of denial. In short, cancer cells are immature confused, dissociated, damaged, alienated from their purpose and place within the larger organism, as well as, being presumably unconscious and "in denial" of these things. Historical humanity, including its denial-facilitating technical infrastructure, could be described in exactly this way.
And it really seems to be the unconsciousness/denial that makes for the malignancy (though it seems that competition in various forms makes for much of the denial). This bringing together of Unconsciousness and Denial is a strange thing on the face of it since it is hard to see how you can be in denial of something of which your are unconscious. This gets back to the ambiguous feelings about the moral aspect of this whole situation that I brought up at the beginning. I think there is some resolution of the issue in the realization that "consciousness is consciousness of togetherness" and that no one is absolutely unconscious, and so the choice always exists to be open to greater inclusivity of meaning, or to be closed to it in principle (usually because of some intuited fear that such openness would disturb ones inner or outer status quo or otherwise challenge ones status or self-conception relative to others). Denial then would be a kind of fear-based siding of the emotions with the seeming security ofthe status quo against expanded consciousness, probably in response to the competitive and alienated context which informs everything in this culture. So such a competitive culture selects for denial, alienation, and phoniness , both in terms of the malignant technologies of denial that thrive in it and in terms of the phony and alienated social relationships it fosters.
This relationship aspect deserves more comment. Generally speaking friendships, partnerships, social circles are not conscientious, soulful associations dedicated to the compassionate work of inner and outer healing. People are not coming together in an inclusive and non-alienated spirit to help each other and the world recover from our shared sick culture and from the specific individual forms of Alienated Phoniness this takes in each each of us. Rather people tend to come together in basically dissociated, exclusive in-groups in which the tacit intention seems to be establishing and maintaining (or just assuming) some sense of superiority over those excluded, largely through what amounts to the the tacit denial of everyones equal and shared participation in the very sick, dissociated, culture that such associations exemplify and that I am trying to get across in this blog.
In this connection I can't resist mentioning the "logical technique" of "Invidious Comparison" by which this is collusive denial is usually facilitated (more of this and other "Life-Logical fallacies" in future life-logic posts). The formula is essentially "A" is good (and so does not have to change) because "A" is better than "B". Of course even If it were true that A were "better" than "B" in a given respect or even in every conceivable respect), it would not mean that A is Good. Before the concept got subsumed into the competitive paradigm, something was Good because it helped other things (indeed every other thing) be Good, more whole, more itself, rather than because it surpassed them. Unlike "better-ness" or "best-ness, Goodness does not presume some kind primary alienation, exclusion, or zero-sum competition. If A is a good A it would be because it helps B be a good B and visa versa. Goodness, like Truth, Beauty, etc, implies an inclusive, non-alienated, holistic, healing quality and emphatically does not belong at the beginning of any list which includes "better" and 'best" in our ordinary sense of those words, which take their essence from a sort one-dimensional, narrow (myopic), and usually linear framework. Socially speaking, such an invidious confusion of better-ness with goodness, translates in to "We are good and so can afford to be complacent, because we are better than "They" (in this or that respect which WE are sure is decisive), and thus our closeness to each other is more or less based on our alienation from outsiders and on our denial of our shared disease of alienated-phoniness, however different our symptoms may be from those of others. Moreover in such a model "they" (that is , those in group B), have just as much a claim to complacency and rightousness vis-a-vis some carefully chosen group C as A might claim toward them, and C of course will choose its own object of invidious comparison and so on and so on...In the light of ongoing entropy, what can this be but a shared dynamic of mutual degeneration cultural erosion?
Of course the point would not change anything essentially to reverse things and replace collusive and alienated shared complacency with equally alienated and misbegotten sense of inferiority, shame, envy and "ambition", as that would if anything only accelerate the same delusional, disintegrative, "synentropic" process. It is as though we were all different particles of soil on an eroding hillside; complacency does nothing to slow or stop the ongoing erosion and a general competitive scramble to be higher up the hill, let alone "King of the Hill" would make things worse.
What I am trying to do with these blogs it to facilitate ways for everyone (including myself) to sustainably reverse this underling competitive (alienated) dynamic of denial-enabled cultural erosion in ourselves and each other--and so "build healthy cultural soil" together---in a way that is genuine, balanced and so avoids becoming simply another form of competitive alienation (for example in the "less-alienated-and-phony-than-thou" sense). This is why I want to be clear that accepting that (like everyone else), one suffers from and is involved in one way or another (actually in many, many ways) with the technology of denial (whether or not this is explicitly medical), is the most important aspect of recovery from it. After all, this acceptance--which is more like an insight or act of comprehension--is obviously already a breach in the very regime of denial and mutual alienation the Technology of Denial itself exists to maintain, and so is also a sign of a present and potentially ongoing recovery of the health and sanity.
Moreover, once this sophisticated; (shameless/prideless, yet inwardly and outwardly compassionate, committed, and resolute) attitude of recovery is awake in us, it is sometimes even possible, to use or modify the technology itself in such a way that it does support healing. For instance, with regard to glasses, there are various ways to limit the use of the glasses or contact lenses to when it is really necessary, while practicing vision exercises like the Bates Method when not using them. There is even a paradoxical use of lenses (a series of increasingly strong reading glasses for Myopes for example) which, when used properly and combined with other things, works to reverse the degenerative effects of normal glasses.Such Technologies might be called soft technologies or "Technologies of Recovery" rather than of Denial (I also call them Coremissive Technologies, but more on that later ). Of course such technologies can only be really technologies of Recovery if they are coordinated with a general culture of recovery; otherwise another pattern of denial (perhaps a more "new-agey one) is likely to replace the old one.
Now | want to be very clear here; What I am saying is that the conditions of our culture make a persons suffering from one or another form of psycho-physical disorder inevitable, whether this is obvious or not. It is a sick culture and it does not produce healthy people (it does not even produce healthy conceptions of health). No one is born with or allowed to acquire, enough critical distance to escape some form or other of the alienated cosmology, identity politics, and rituals or our culture, even if these were not inextricably mixed up with an equally alienated and toxic physical infrastructure to which we are all forcibly exposed. This situation being universal, the more obvious any given persons particular "pattern of trauma" is the better, in as much as it becomes that much easier to acknowledge and treat.
What I am getting at is that I don't want anyone to feel guilty or ashamed for wearing glasses (or having breast implants, or being involved in any other the myriad heads of the hydra of sick culture) anymore than I want anyone to feel proud for not doing this or that particular thing. Pride and Shame are themselves forms of denial, and trying to perfectly address (or even assess) this or any particular aspect of sick culture in isolation would itself be a psychologically myopic move, as though curing this specific symptom would actually cure, rather than potentially strengthen (by strengthening denial), ones underlying disease of sick culture. It might not even make sense, in a given situation, to make this area visual cognition a priority in ones process of recovery (though making a beginning--since this is so easy to do seems like a good idea so long as its coordinated with a general process of recovering from sick culture as a whole).
To try to give more of an example of what mean, I will use myself: I, who am also physically myopic to a certain vary variable extent, do some and have done all of the above mentioned coping/recovery work with glasses and without them. I don't wear glasses these days, (though I would if I really needed to for a specific limited purpose). I do eye exercises when I think of it but I can be a slacker at it. I listen to a lot of books with Text-to-speech on an ebook thing to spare my eyes, though I still probably read too much and not always in the best "Alexander Technique" way. Most of the time I feel that I am at least not going backward in this area. This is actually pretty good, almost ideal really, since there are so many other aspects of sick culture that I ( like everybody) suffer from and have to deal with. Going off the deep end about getting "perfect sight" would likely just mean a failure to "coordinate my problems", with the ultimate effect that this particular symptom would be gone (at least temporarily) while various others, and worst of all, the actual underlying disease, will have only been strengthened (perhaps I would become "big headed about my sight, my cognitive myopia having ironically gotten worse while I myopically fixated on "conquering" my physical myopia). Things could always change of course but for the time being at least I am happy with the state of coordination of this part of my recovery process with rest of it. I see "very well" some of the time, not so well some of the time and fair-to-middling most of the time. The main thing is for me to not be in denial about this general state of affairs or about the state any other symptom of my own sick culture and to do the best I can not to either over-fixate on it or neglect it all together. Having as little recourse to the relevant technology-of-denial as practicable (glasses in this case) actually facilitates the "minimizing neglect" part because my state of seeing itself tells me when I have been too lax in my "healthy-sightedness" practices and in general need to step things up in this area relative with other things, at least for a while. The main thing is to keep working on the disease while I keep all the various symptoms attended to best I can in a way that is coordinated with and facilitates that work; to keep everything more or less progressing in a coordinated way both in terms of my inner relationship with myself as an "Individual" and my outer relationships with others as a "Person"...
I may not have sufficiently proven the claims of the the above paragraph to you so far (though, If you have read the last 4 or 5 of these posts I am not sure why not, and would be interested to receive your comments on the matter). Anyway, I think if you keep reading this blog you will be convinced eventually.
So; conclusion: I have used as my main example the technology and culture of glasses (and their dissociation-and-denial-facilitating effects), rather then more obvious technologies of denial like the use of Alcohol and a host of other legal and illegal drugs, just because the glasses business is clearly such an "innocent" thing. All the others are also essentially innocent in the same way, but the fact that no one asked to be so systematically deprived of necessary love and affection during critical development years that the only way they can experience something that feels like a genuine hug is through an external chemical substitute, is, evidently, less easy to see then the fact the no one deliberately abuses their eyesight in order to become addicted to another substitute technology-of-denial like glasses/contacts/surgery that also worsens, rather than addresses the original condition and its causes. On the other hand I think part of me also wants to scare you a little, as I have recently been scared, with the situation of ever increasing myriads of morally, intellectually and physically myopic "educated" professionals, specialists, managers, and "efficient" workers (all equally proud of being thoroughly "detail oriented" and equally oblivious of any inability to put those details in proper perspective or single out the truly relevant ones), so adapted to the hierarchy of slaves and the culture of denial as to be unable to conceive of anything else, running around in charge things. Of course, things have pretty much been that way since even before what we call civilization. The fact that in our time the situation seems to have hyper-metastasized, is not cause for panic, but, hopefully thinking about it will give you some sense of urgency about this whole sick culture/healthy culture thing.
*note: I usually use the word "Comalignant" to stress the two-fold (inner/psychological as well as outer/social) nature of the pathology of sick culture I am describing, just as I use the word "Coremissive" (as well as "Cointegrative"), to describe the culture of recovery (healthy culture), when looked at from this point of view. I didn't in the above sentence because I thought introducing such a neologism at that time would be unnecessarily distracting in that particular place....I'll say more about such things later...
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Postscript
Ever since writing this post I have felt that, because I so wanted people not to become psychologically myopic in thinking about their physical myopia, I down played the effects of the latter--and so the need to begin addressing--it a bit too much. Its a tricky balancing act I am trying to manage in addressing this kind of thing at all, but when you consider how much vision figures in brain and mind functioning in general, its not something I want to under-emphasize.
Since its been quite a while since I researched the topic, I wanted to finish the the book "Conscious Seeing" by Roberto Kaplan, (as well as another similar book, ) before adding this postscript, but other things seem to be supervening, and I think I can ease my conscience about it just by exploring the implications of what I have read so far.
Kaplan says that glasses and contacts have the effect of deferentially focusing light directly on the fovea centralis to compensate for the eyes inability to do this properly and in a balanced way. The fovea centralis is the most acutely "analytical" part of the retina, whereas the rest of the retina tends toward the more diffusive and field-like (corresponding to right-brain functioning).
This makes me suspect that glasses and contacts etc might facilitate that kind of either/or "panic-logic" that the culture is informed by, through (among other things) dissociating right brain and left brain thinking. My guess is that correspondingly, thinking and feeling are likely to become more dissociated from each other and less nuanced and flexible in themselves, so that a person under the influence of this sort of technology might have a tendency both to look at things in black and white ways, and/or to flip-flop between being over emotional (sentimental) and over intellectual (coldly calculating or excessively abstract). Of course this itself is an oversimplification of the actual kind of imbalance that is likely to result in a real person. Nevertheless, I suspect that, in a lot of people who have been wearing glasses most of their lives, the brain circuits will have been assimilating to the this one-sided effect of the lenses, (as well as to the subliminal emotional effect of the constant stress in the eyes that has to be there in order to maintain the exact degree of refractive error the glasses are prescribed to correct for), and that they are likely to think that the above mentioned, (or any similar) tendencies of thought and feelings they might have are either just a natural part of their character or something that just reflects reality ("feelings are usually opposed to thoughts--thats just the way it is").
All of this seems to me a big deal because, if one is making decisions and interpreting reality and information in such a dichotomized, uncoordinated, insufficiently nuanced or graduated way because of ones mind/brain's subconscious assimilation to an unhealthy technology, its going to be hard to sustain a balanced view of the importance of that very problem (as well as any other problem really). Either one will over emphasize the problem (and so abandon any attempt to deal with it--and our sick culture in general-- as hopeless) or one will under under emphasize it (since it is only one of a myriad of technologies and infrastructures of denial in a culture full of them and can therefor, presumably wait indefinitely to be addressed).
Although it is true that the culture is full of technologies of denial, (I would even say that it is a good rule to assume any technology, or ritual of the dominant culture to be at least partly guilty until proven wholly innocent), it seems that the ones that effect the mind itself--and so the powers of discernment-- in a constant and ongoing (and likely degenerative) way need to be singled out for special recovery measures for that very reason. Of course almost any psycho active drug that is used daily ( or at such a frequency that there is no time to for its effects to really wear off) is in this same category. And also, there are certain ritual and infrastructures of apartness which, in future posts, I will argue are similarly crucial to begin to address for similar reasons.
I want to emphasize the word "begin" in the previous sentence, since that is all I am taking about really. There is no idea of having to ever "having dealt with" any of aspect of sick culture in the sense of having achieved perfect state of achievement or whatever. That would very probably be a bad sign itself for many reasons, some of which I've already gone into. One begins....One begins again. In general the culture of recovery is pretty comic in spirit, full of back-slidings, errors, failed experiments etc...there are no ranks or grades and its the farthest thing from feeding the ego or any egoic sense of "righteousness" of any kind. Its like a kind of progressive balance between balance and imbalance itself, in which the one can only be maintained by constantly acknowledging and being sensitive to presence (manifest or not yet manifest), of the other.... the kind of thing that, when you're doing it right, the process itself is its own reward, (which is great because, as I say, the process is endless....)
