thank god that's over


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...

Both are men whose work, upon my first notice of it, sparked some real interest in me... in many. Both also fell like mighty redwoods by the chainsaw-wielding influence of name and fame, money and power — personal, professional, cultural. Crap.

You might wonder why Jesus, the man or the myth, remains after millennia, but I don't, because he didn't sell out in the face of that much pressure to abdicate his intent for the prosaic forms of satisfaction.

Both of these men did. The Crustacean Jung disgracing himself most, here, I guess, against Cocaine Hegel, who, for all his faults, is quite visibly not hobbled by vanity. The whole thing is depressing as hell to me because it's only a way for people to waste our telomeres lost in this contemporary theatric about meaning.

It's identical to other forms of activism. The activity that gained the attention is immediately shielded from corrupting the machine-so-odious like foreign bodies our defenses can't expel from our biological systems. They are rendered inert, encapsulated by immune system gunk to prevent infection or other interference in function... turned into benign tumors that can be left in place or removed surgically.

The gunk encapsulating the foreign bodies in this metaphor is made up of ego and its almost inevitable fall to the dazzling array of perquisites accompanying recognition. The beautiful insights or higher purposes are rendered by the corrupted survival mechanism into tumors by the bearer's ability to excuse the ensuing failure to move forward because he or she is too busy trying to maintain the elevation from anonymity and fiscal embarrassment, the knee jerk unwillingness to lose ground in the acquisition of goodies department.

This isn't just a fact of prominent "public intellectuals". It applies to everyone. The good-beautiful-true slimes itself with the evil-ugly-false because when your income depends on your failure to recognize actuality, everything in the lexicon is tailor made to prevent that recognition.

In the end, nobody's fooled, but everybody understands.


pipe up any time....