/lit/ - Literature

People like Ted view culture not as a mode of emergent transformation that discloses deeper and wider worlds, but primarily a distorting force that conceals and contorts both a pure nature and their truly pristine selves. Culture is not a transformative emergence of greater differentiation/integration that can go too far into dissociation/alienation. No, culture is primarily an alienating force that necessarily and nastily separates humans from nature and them from themselves.

And so above all, they must get away from culture and get back to nature, back to a wilderness that expresses a pure nature and their own most authentic impulses. Culture is fundamentally a crime of distortion, and they must seek behind this distortion for the truth of pure nature and the truth of their pure selves.

That culture (and the rational-ego) can indeed repress and dissociate natural/libidinal impulses is true enough, and those alienated impulses need to be recontacted, freed from the cultural repressions, and reintegrated into the psyche (regression in service of the ego). But when culture is seen as only or primarily a repressive force, then the cure is regression, period, and this is the self-defeating and self-contradictory stance that Ted and his acolytes embrace.

They claim that for our salvation, we are to retreat, not prior to the dissociation, but prior to the differentiation that had allowed the dissociation: not simply prior to the disease, but prior to the depth itself!—which amounts to: cure the disease by becoming more shallow.

The Ego-Enlightenment set out to free Eros from its heteronomy, its immersion in conformist and herd mentalities; and it sought this autonomy with such force that it went too far into alienation, and ended up with Eros degenerating into Phobos: seeking freedom, it found only fear and alienation, which bound it even more tightly to that which it wished to transcend.

And the Eco camp, so intensely desiring insertion into a Larger Life, an Agape that embraces the depth of the Kosmos with joyful Love and Care, ends up scraping layers and layers of depth off the universe in search of the primal ground where this insertion can occur: it reduces the deeper and higher to the lower and shallower, a reduction and regression and leveling that, by any other name, is Thanatos. In search of a larger life, it finds only a morbid death (i.e., a lesser depth), a rancid leveling of just those differentiations that allowed the search in the first place.

Problem?