The unconscious alone is moral, and we must judge a man and his virtuous act, not by the consequences, nor the intent, but by the unconscious system it came out from.
The undermind is for internalizing structures and systems, sometimes called “schemas.” Such a system may be a city map, or a route to school, but in fact every data of our experience is to fit into a spherical system. We have the earth sphere, the self sphere, the family sphere, the national sphere. We have a sense of how all spheres fit into each other, and sing together.
The first internalization of the world will be the reactions of others, and therefore, our expectations of the world. All shames and preemptive forebodings of shame, therefore all guilt which is an anticipation of shame, are actually nothing more than expectations of the world. This engine of shame and guilt is the mores system of society. By the time we are adults, a complex network of decency is internalized till we take it for natural, right, god-sent, unquestionable.
For every sphere needs a sense of integrity, and so guards itself against doubt, assualt, and questioning. Certain mores are encoded to feel nervous to question. And the more this nervousness is felt very deep below the consciousness, so that the consciousness gets the shyest whiff of it, the more we are governed by the idea, and consciously unaware of it, though unconsciously determined by it.
When a child first restructures a desire, handled by him as a proposition (this basic language is easy enough: a symbol of the self, the object, the desire, and the action to enact it) in order to take the pain of the desire, and the wrongness of the desire, into the conscious mind, where pain is no longer loved but hated, the proposition must be reversed, inverted, introjected, projected, euphemized, and generalized. And at every step of this reformulation, we must feel the implied previous meaning and yet not know its full meaning, so that once the conscious appropriate idea is prepared, we intuitively know the full chain of restructurings behind it.
This refomulative process becomes streamline, habitual, and easy, causing no nervousness, until a society, in mutual emulation, develops a form of entertainment for itself that lets them nod and laugh in mutual agreement that these original desires are enjoyable, and yet not seeing them for what they are. They come back to the ME’s basic needs for love and power, which are too intense and impossible without ten layers of interpretation, of indirection, to give us a sense of delay and a chance to review possibilities. This indirection alone makes mankind the true animal, and the deceitful animal, that which delays its needs long enough to open up a new avenue.
The more formalized these definite but indirect urges of masturbation are, and by masturbation I mean a direct fulfilling of an urge, we call these practices “rites” “ceremonies” and “traditions.” Every society is a sphere, and in that sphere, all possible contingencies must have a relatively immediate solution. No society is caught with its pants down. For within it the criminals, con men, lawyers, interpreters, and exploiters wish to short circuit the system, in the name of “honesty” and “truth” in order to uncover the ten layers of maya that we put there on purpose, in order to gain control over the immediate demands of the need. Anything that is assaulted by such parasites developes immune systems, counter attacks, safetly valves, etc. These may seem like street violence, fashion fads, parties, parades, or whatever else seems a chaos of anarchy, but in fact, a nation is very integrated, a synchronized dance, the most meticulous of crystal clockwork.
The self-deception must be fully known and feared, and so self-represented in a double fasion, so that the full lie can be talked about and embraced when it doubles as another reality. It is like a husband who visits a prostitute after work who happens to live next to the grocery store. He can talk all about his visit to the grocery store to his wife, and fail to mention who lives next to it. But for the self-deception, it is not the whore who lives next to the grocery store, but the whore who is the grocery store, so that I can be absolutely honest and explicit about object X, while secretly feeling that every aspect of it also stands for hidden Y. It would be as if two conspirators created a secret cypher and memorized it, and then sent each other quotes from Bartletts that were seemingly straight forward quotes, but were chosen from all the thousands of quotes because these alone also fit the cypher and revealed the true message.
We internalize all spheres in our life, and thus through this internalization have an interface when we enter the external system. A banker can tell when something is amiss in his accounts, intuitively, because he has internalized a set of stereotypes of how the system can go, and this internalization directs his eyes to the the external system he plugs it into, and detects subtle discrepencies.
A book may have a set of meanings, like lines
======= == ======== =========== ========
Within about one thousand meanings, an undermaning is exposed.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
u1 u2
And scholars can easily show that this meaning is truly there and not introjected there.
Amond all these undermeanings, after a 100 of them is a deeper meaning.
u1 u2 u3
uu1
And so on till we get to the central insights of the author. How deep an author has dared go determines how meaningful all his books are. The greatest books go the deepest, and will not be understood for thousands of years.
Language is an instrument of desire, as the tongue is nothing but desire. It both communicates desire and disguises it. For the most obvious and direct desires are considered obsense, exploitive, cruel, etc. not in themselves but always and only because they are so bare and immediate. A deep man will speak many things, and be happy when people talk at their level, but knows immediately when he hears somebody respond to his deepest meaning. This is how great men and women find each other and fall in love
How to desire is by no means evident. The first instinctual desire is to learn how we should desire in our culture. Television, movies, stories, and myths fulfill this desire by teaching us how to desire other things. We desire first of all a map, and impose this map on our own hearts.
Most of the desires we are taught to seek in society are the desires from the consciousness of the full society, to keep us cheerfully frustrated so that we will make the system work. We must always seek more junk to keep capitolism working. Diogenes, if followed, would destory Greece. Anybody who is self-satisfied is the enemy of society, and the greatest, insofar as he teaches others how to be as well.
Our work in all systems requires an ingterface to handle.
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Perfection Is Easy
www.msu.edu/~junedan
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