Election Theater Countdown, Nobel Bob, & the Problem with Christians

Since I’ve found myself posting a lot on Faceborg, I thought I may as well share these pearls of wisdom somewhere other than the NSA swine trough.
Election Theater
There are two issues I can see: one is Hillary’s complicity with the horrendous power-abuses of oligarchy and all we know about that (inescapable fact, at the very least she is remaining silent about it), combined with the strange notion that it is better to vote for one sociopath over another because of their spoken policies or personality traits.
The other is the idea that the presidential figurehead represents anything besides the oligarchy that got hir there, that policies will in any way alter because of a periodical changing of the guard, and that individual votes have anything to do with which figurehead the oligarchy selects to represent it.

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Everything politicos say or do is scripted and strategic and generally aimed to keep stirring the pot of public confusion & debate; it’s Greek theater without the catharsis. I pay as little attention as I can to what’s happening on stage, and focus as much as possible on the audience.
Doublethink & polarization seem to go hand in hand: any incoming data can only be perceived in a binary model, as for or against, and if it is against, then it must be in support of the opposing team; meanwhile the fact that one’s own side is equal in every important regard to the enemy (because they belong to the same gaming system) is the dancing elephant in the room, and only keeping one’s eyes & ears tightly closed to everything but the partisan voices in one’s head can keep its reverberations out of awareness.
How to approach a sleepwalker who is drowning in a nightmare and grasping at imaginary straws? Firm but compassionate is a difficult balance, especially when getting too close to the drowner means risking being pulled down oneself.

I am puzzled that people who like Dylan’s music would be pleased by his being inducted into the Halls of Social Orthodoxy. My impression was that those who like Dylan, those I know anyway, are themselves quite anti-establishment and see Bob as “one of them,” i.e., one of the good guys. For me it’s getting harder to enjoy music from establishment figures like Dylan or Cohen knowing what becoming established entails; i.e., to separate the man from the music. Hence my hunt for non-established musicians.
To be clear: I am not now nor have I ever been a Dylan fan. I think it’s a bit absurd him getting the Nobel prize for literature and it smacks of pandering to me. But I think the Nobel prize is itself a bit absurd, or a lot absurd, and I don’t know why people would need or want to have their tastes validated by a cultural institution run by strangers for unknown ends. My only real interest is in the people who post in my Faceborg feed and why they post the things they do, why they believe what they do. This isn’t a neutral or a dispassionate interest, and the whole notion of artist-celebrity worship is one that is especially disturbing to me as I was raised in that church and have only recently renounced that religion. Where once I thought all politicians were psychopaths, I now fear that all public figures are, too, including my former heroes. It sucks and one way to assuage that suckiness is to try and talk people into joining me in my never-ending liminality of not quite in but not all the way out of the matrix of culture
I think a threshold has been crossed at which public figures no longer need to be “engineered” to the same degree. Once upon a time, let’s say, it was like we imagine the mafia, born into it and/or selected young and groomed, initiated, compromised, etc, and then given power & influence. Now I think the culture has become so firmly entrenched in us psychologically and biologically, on the one hand, and the structures of socio-political power have become so fully aligned with cultural institutions, on the other, that we, the people, are more”trustable” to select, and even become, our own rulers.
Where once I sought to become established I now fear it.
The configuration of a culture determines what goes “viral.”
I’m reaching the point of not wanting to imbibe material from anyone I don’t have a personal connection with. How it was in the days of old.
I think it relates to being able to reality check. A personal connection doesn’t mean we can know who that person really is or what they are capable of, but at least we know how they are with us, and at least we can connect to them in a real, two-way connection and start to “feel” them in our bodies (if that doesn’t sound too weird!). as compared to having a long-distance phantasy relationship in which what we are seeing is 99% projection, and which is inherently disempowering.
Dylan can’t have that personal connection to everyone his music reaches, it’s logistically impossible even if he wanted it (and who would?). This suggests there’s something wrong with the mechanics of performer-audience, from the inception. It’s OK to have a receiver, because communication takes two. But size matters, and less is more.
 
Christians, Ancestors, Splinters
Being Christian requires doublethink, and the nature of doublethink is the inability to see contradiction. Any Christian who believes in both God & Satan is living inside a contradiction, akin to Americans who believe that the US vs. Iraq is a “war.”
In the true sense of “sin,” i.e., missing the mark, Christians are among the most sinful people on the planet, which is how & why the creed gave birth to a shadow such as Satanism…
There is no good or evil: only lesser or greater degrees of embodiment or fragmentation.
God is the whole; any fragment that claims to be the whole, no matter how wisely or benevolently, is a devil in disguise.
After a recent exchange with a Christian reader, I am beginning to wonder how anyone who’s lacking even a basic understanding of, and respect for, the unconscious, psychic fragmentation, and the effects of trauma on people and societies, can ever really “grok” what I do? The answer is, they can’t; so then why are they drawn to me and my stuff? It’s troubling, because presumably they are finding something here to reinforce their biases, rather than something that leads them to question them.

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Our ancestors are still with us because they are us, and we them. It takes a degree of maturation to realize this, and some people never reach that realization. This only makes them more unconscious, not more autonomous.

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To know at an intellectual level requires speaking what you know before you know you know it.
What if that splinter in your mind is your only true friend?