joculum

Having offered a partial recantation (that is, singing again in a different key) to friends only, I shall attempt an explication one more time of my dubious speculation.

Most of the time, human beings are held prisoner by reification...by the notion that social relations and projected mental valuations of physical objects are in fact the immutable structure of reality. Codes of ethics are likewise reified as a set of prescriptions and proscriptions..."thou shalt not" and "thou shalt" and not much in between the two binaries.

But when major cultural shifts set in, and they have thus set in repeatedly over the many generations since the supplantation of hunting and gathering by formal agriculture and the first attempts at making something bigger than a reed hut that wouldn't fall down on the residents' heads, there must be personality types that see clearly some of the rules of the game.

And some of those probably create new organizations in which they believe, and some must belong to organizations in which they believe, but which they see are also not the whole story.

And it must have occurred to at least some of these folks that they could tell stories or present philosophical conundrums that would make other people act the way they wanted, in a general fashion. (Without having to resort to all those "thou shalts" that lead to the reaction, "Hell no, I ain't gonna do that!")

And at least some of the bizarre and paradoxical literary and philosophical documents of the ages may be, and I should have said may be, a linked chain of such attempts.

But the chain exists not because the originator wanted to establish a succession but because successive generations of people, existing in their own social limitations, realized that these books were excellent resources from which they could create their own attempts at the genre of books meant to influence specific personality types in a certain way, and maybe have the side effect of having the personality types create their own reified organizations. Or maybe not.

Sometimes the writers may have had in mind that such cute little conventicles of like-minded people should come into being. In our own time, they seem to have created rather amorphous organizations that were intended to function in their lifetimes but not create generational hierarchies; and it isn't quite clear what those organizations were doing in terms of self-aware functioning, Sometimes they seemed to be throwing up smoke and mirrors more for the sake of their own amusement than anything else, and sometimes they seemed more like the Mashpee Indians as James Clifford describes them, a group that in some generations seems to have thought of itself as a tribe and other times seems not to have thought of itself as anything at all.

Of course, the full dimensions of social relations and their delusional and illusory nature (with real and often deadly effects...very much Marianne Moore's imaginary gardens with real toads in them) didn't become systematically known until after the great social analysts of the nineteenth century. And even then people can't quite get their heads around the concepts, and turn the relationships and the theories into reified creations of their own. (The Great God Theory squats atop a good many university departments, demanding sacrifices.)

So the secret protects itself even when the secret is secular and not at all related to occult powers. Sometimes the curtain is pulled aside to reveal that there is no man behind the curtain, because every interacting part of the land of Oz is generating the fiction that there is a Wizard making the whole shebang run. And sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, the truth is far weirder than that.

But I'll settle for the non-weird explanation for now, especially since I initially typed "weird" as "wired."

It gets me out of this blathering post in a hurry, anyway....