Wrath and Honesty
The Sun represent justice, truth and force, under sun’s eminence in sun’s presence contracts were signed in Ancient Rome. It represents wrath and glory, stability and intellect, self-derived from its constitution and its soul. Upon Earth’s surface, its presence in day-time gave a never-ending procession of myths, it is the most reassuring time-cycle that is embedded in human souls since the dawn of their consciousness.
Yet, people are clustering around most history-driven processes that contradict the foundation of those processes, they give in to the most satisfying untruths, given to an illusion of temporary order, comfort and control. One Japanese prince was quoted in “Shobogenzo” by Master Dogen, he uttered: “What is true to one is false to another, what is false to one, is true to the opponent”. It is enough to learn from Ancient Greek courts that the testimonial of witnesses was ranked of lesser value than that derived from probability and demonstrated evidence. People see what they want to see, they believe what they want to believe: satisfy their eyes, ears, beliefs, and you are a friend. Contradict them and you are scorned or mocked at best, or become their sworn enemy at worst. The honest survive only amongst the like-minded, the cunning until their caught.
Look at the beliefs seething in the noosphere, check their logic, rationality, reason, evidence, facts, expertise, knowledge. Even in such risky territories as metaphysics reason is necessary, especially among the non-convinced, to get any argument forward. Among the believers, however, whether be it a political stance, a religious system, a delusional conspiracy theory, justification for one’s behavior and feeling - none of it is required. In such a way ignorance is a-historical, not only that, it is anti-historical.
How many offensives had, for example, christian fortress besieged by the brightest of minds and “detractors” survived. How many brainwashed souls and minds and hearts would give away their lives, liberties, decency, intelligence in order for this grand historicized lie to thrive. Yet, it persists! No one wants to eliminate faith as such, it is necessary to metaphysize a person to complete him, however, not at the cost of thwarting and tying up his soul in pain, suffering, guilt, condescending hypermoralizing, doctrines that destroy his mind and soul.
Politicizing and weaponizing faiths as ordering narrative machines and tools of control are handy, exactly because of persistence of beliefs and the need to fill the existential and spiritual void. No one wants to abolish the science behind the CERN accelerator or the ITER fusion project, yet there are few experts taken out of population of Earth that are capable of understanding and building it. ITER and CERN doesn’t fulfill existential needs, it fulfills technological visions of the future. No one wants to abolish faith too, yet faith is easy, millions. There were attempts at impregnating religions with reason, for example the neoplatonizing Ismaili Islam, the neoplatonizing Renaissance Christian writers, but all those attempts failed, because neoplatonism, at least as represented by Plotinus - was anti-Gnostic, anti-Galilean, anti-Christian. For exactly the same reasons, those religions had nothing to do with reasoned faith, and no matter how hard you tried, they couldn’t be, for reason would dismantle them to the core as irrational. Yet, Christianity and Islam persist till modern day, neoplatonism is a past-time hobby of a handful philosophers, small interest groups and academicians.
The curse of expert knowledge is: “if everybody would know, they would”. They won’t, because its not in their scope of intellectual efforts. The blessing of politics is “they don’t know, so let’s use it”. Analogically, the curse of history is “it will repeat itself if they won’t know”, the blessing of power is “we will use the same methods, to repeat it”.
Well, the damage done to intellectual culture in civilized societies is immense, the destruction of faculties to think critically, in an informed manner, to research and gather an in-depth knowledge of a topic is by and large reserved for the few. Among faith- and religious-oriented people there is a swathe of ignorance related to history, origin, transformation, discourse of their own faith. The preference is to select cherries from the cake that befit a believer most. There is not a single monolithic religion, there are small oscillating sectarian beliefs that would be considered a heresy among the orthodox. Yet, they all usurp the right to be most profound, most true, most beneficial.
In this, I prefer the honest Iamblichean “theology and philosophy was created by men for men, there was no god-given revelation”. He was not a man of small faith, he was a thamaturgist and a theurgist of neoplatonic creed. Yet, he was well aware of his “cloud of unknowing”, his apophatic uncertainties and the origin of all mythemes, religions etc. The way we create simulations of Divinities and act therein in the world is our simulation, a projection, as long as it is effective - it holds its ground, but it never objectively true. In that I prefer “approximating realization” or “uncertain truths”, to “revealed religions”, and “incontestable doctrines”.
This framework relates to politics in meta-politics, there is only as much chaos as nature tolerates, inasmuch as human nature and its civilized, idyllical or beastly, horrendous structure allows. Laws of entropy work, golden ages pass, iron ages kick in.