Separation is an important theme in political and economic discourse, a theme that is far-reaching and multifaceted. But for now I'd like to just focus on one aspect of separation, the growing separation between national mythology and imagery and daily living consciousness.
A good and immediate example comes out of the recent blitz of electioneering and the culmination of that process. Watching the glitzy presentations and carefully pruned speeches of the winning liberal factions - which nevertheless come across as half-hearted - one has the vague sense that some terrible nightmare is over, and that we can come back together and begin to heal, and take back control.
One wonders about the state of consciousness in such a performance: the speaker is obviously gazing out far in the distance at some fanciful construction of words and feelings, smiling at the illustrations in those fleeting moments of the trance, which will surely be swept away after the speaker steps down off of the podium.
Because on the ground, there is a deep apprehension and uncertainty as the third wave of the virus swells, and the thick hatred that pervades the body politic has failed to clear.
It takes energy to prop up a given ideal and narrative, and then to struggle in the direction of that ideal, and within the dictates of that narrative, much as struggling against gravity, whereas the energetic flows, the stuff of daily life here in the U.S., are following the course set before them by gravity, which presently flows towards contraction.
One can imagine some sort revelatory moment in which the political and economic machinery is seized, the engines of capital are shut down, and a benevolent directive issues forth: those with too much will liquidate their accumulations, and those with too little will be made whole, and our collective energy use will be vastly drawn down as we turn to appropriate technologies and subsistence lifestyles (aided by the good spoils of modern invention of course), with all collectively relinquishing the death grip on world conquest simultaneously, to move gracefully in the direction of contraction until our lot stabilizes.
Though of course, such a scenario is certainly absurd and however reasonable it sounds - at least for averting total catastrophe, as we are too far down the pipe at this point - it becomes ever more laughable the more one thinks about it in the face of reality on the ground, and what has tended to happen historically.
No, the lemon will be squeezed ever harder to juice the dream, and so the forces of aggression and destruction will strengthen and the contraction will come anyway in more forceful fits. Given the vision of this increasingly cloistered ideal - which like a hot wire tightens ones grasp as one undergoes the shock - and the putrefaction of the reality surrounding it, the totalitarian specter becomes much more intelligible.
To maintain such a separation - that is, a separation that struggles against the interconnectedness of an entity growing at the expense of another - the shrinking half has to be kept faced away from the prospects of its own annihilation. A tall order for a living thing.
