Good Propaganda Bad Propaganda

A lot of propaganda is built up around some sort of positive guiding ideology that is rooted in a historical formation, which grew out of that positive ideology but which has transformed out of all recognition of that historical form, thus necessitating the propaganda. 

History, being the infinitely complex process that it is, always involves some mythmaking in understanding it, both as it unfolds and then after as it is understood in retrospect, but guiding ideologies do tend to derive their legitimacy by being somewhat congruent with, or descriptive of, or at least consonant with some sort of underlying reality. 

And when you're in control and trying to make some sort of state of affairs that is benefitting you last, one of the things to do is to constantly convince those subordinate to you that that beneficial state of affairs is happening because it is good, and that you are all powerful together because of that, and that it needs to continue to exist that way, even as it continues to transform far beyond what it started out as. 

The size of that gap between the propaganda and the form that the propaganda seeks to freeze tends to determine what is good propaganda and bad propaganda, even when the organs of propaganda are highly advanced and ostensibly good at what they do. You can't dictate what reality is forever. 

Maelstrom

Here in the US, one can observe an enormous amount of energy bound up in antagonisms: all of the analysis spent on what is going wrong, or taking apart some popular and efficacious piece of propaganda, or tearing apart one's social and political rivals' positions, and etc. Consider all of the legal and political fighting and energy trying to veto some sort of hostile act or takeover, or else fraudulent and malevolently manipulative behavior.

Of course, deconstruction or demolition is what you have to do in a remodel in which the existing infrastructure is so degraded, rotten, or nonsensical that it would be impossible to build upon it. 

Remediation in the US

If you look at the processes of remediation in the US, say public health and health care, the justice system, the maintenance and regeneration of infrastructure, the furnishing and replacement of personal properties, and etc., you see patterns which are both striking and depressingly familar. Not only do you see an acceleration of damages wrought by increasing exploitation, climate change, collapse of the social contract and state legitimacy, increasing social and political strife, and the like, but you also see growing damages carried out by the very processes of remediation marshalled to address the primary damages in the first place. 

We could start with the decades-long dismantling of public services and hollowing out of the state, resulting in the increasing provision of social goods through private self-interested actors, which the US has a long history of, backed by a long-running ideology of self-reliance, but at the peak of its power the US did provide some degree of guaranteed affluence for a large portion of its population. 

Various forms of private insurance, security provision, legal response to harms inflicted, provision of basic needs, and so on have - in a direct inversion of the libertarian fear - crowded out public provisions, and in so doing, have replaced the prevailing ethic of addressing a given harm or replacing a specific need, putting the onus on the economic power of the individual. 

It is this mercenary ethic that is steadily transforming collective provisions and remediations into an intensifying form of exploitation itself. Insurance and public health for example are increasingly run by consolidating financial companies looking to deny their responsibilities, while all the while collecting profits on the basis of the privilege of monopolist and rentier. Not without first supplying the attendant propaganda of course. 

The cities are not only becoming ever more expensive and dangerous to live in, but the issues arising out of their very political economic environments and management, the damages wrought by homelessness, crime, and pollution for example, are seized upon as additional opportunities of profit. While of course services and employment disappears in the hinterlands and industrial accidents and superfund sites crop up at a growing pace while the perpetrators fail upwards. 

Listen for a giant sucking sound, as they say. Or to use another "emptying out" metaphor, taken all together this all looks like a giant, slow motion bank run, complete with the rising panic. 

On The Trail

I have to remind myself to switch off and just go out and hit the trail and do some unscheduled and unstructured exploring. The oodles of writings and podcasts and music and media at my fingertips are quite wonderful, and have really enriched the depth and breadth of my inner life, but then what you consume tends to fill up your sensory range and direct your thoughts. You never know what you'll start thinking about and feeling just wandering around. 

Intention and Consciousness

There was an old tradition in which ancient and indigenous brewers would pour a little bit of the first batch of beer into the corners of the brewing hut - or into the soil in a certain place, or whatever form that particular tradition would take - as an offering to the entities that made that fermentation possible, such as the earth that birthed the plants used, or in honor of the wild yeasts whose work made such a thing possible. 

The idea was to share or give back something you'd consider valuable. This is something you would do with someone you cared about or respected, like a neighbor coming back with some apples to give you after the sapling you gave them grew up and began to produce. It wouldn't carry the same meaning to offer some waste or biproduct anyway. 

Contrast that practice with what you would likely find in a commercial brewing operation, in which something like that would be considered unsanitary and a little wasteful, where every last drop is conserved as a source of value. This is of course a constructed example rendered in a starker contrast: there are all sorts of different traditions and holdovers in the modern world, but those basic and archetypal differences do crop up. 

The contrast in this case is less intended as criticism - which could be done, but which would take a far greater amount of argument to address - and more an observation that a whole set of practices and traditions can arise out a certain quality of consciousness and intention, which is both inculcated culturally and reproduces the culture. 

And differences in these forms of consciousness and their related practices can yield profoundly different effects and results, effects and results which widen and deepen as the culture is cyclically reproduced and spread and working on the earth. 

Feller Buncher

It is a type of logging equipment; a particularly fearsome one too, as I'll get to in a moment. The machine has kind of a funny, old-timey-sounding name, kinda like "rock 'em sock 'em robots" or something like that, but it does exactly what its composite name suggests. 

You can see huge scars open up on the valley walls within a week of the work of a single operator, which is quite striking. Something like this used to take legions of logging professionals, and now you can see one single machine with its headlights swinging back and forth up on the hillside, grabbing and cutting down the trees and then laying them down onto piles (bunching them) for later collection. It looks quite lonely really. 

Felling a tree can be quite an affecting and tragic event, but if you are cutting down one tree roughly every ten seconds (like this guy was) you probably eventually become less sensitive to it, if you were to begin with. Even from this distance, this guy appeared to be pretty good at what he was doing, a highly skilled and specialized occupation, pivoting and cutting constantly and smoothly, precisely laying the trees where they needed to go, in a certain direction, for later smooth and systematic collection, after which they'll probably be gathered by other machinery and then passed through a machine of rollers and saws that rapidly delimb them in seconds, which can mean hours and hours of work for a single person working on a single fallen tree. 

A massive, rolling, and nearly silent slaughter from that distance, save for the constant whine of the feller's blade, with the pitch changing as the blade cut every 10 seconds or so. 

There is a lot happening both subjectively and economically here, and I'll try to address as much as I can in as compact of a space as possible, hopefully without it getting too busy and convoluted. 

I'm not sure about the particular process I was watching, but it is worth illustrating the general state of the industry and its current path of evolution. Over time logging in the US - like just about everything else here - has become increasingly private equity-run, or at least run by large financialized companies, which as we know favors accelerating, rationalizing, and slimming down production processes in full favor of short term returns. The ownership structures too are increasingly fragmented physically, in favor of a larger financial consolidation which runs counter to that process. So ownership at the same time becomes decoupled from the land itself and the infrastructure, simultaneously as financial and managerial ownership consolidates. 

So there are typically companies that hold the land and own the timber, and then contract out the logging companies who come in and clear-cut the forest, and then are given a cut of the proceeds of the sold lumber. Trucking companies get in on this as well, hauling the lumber to market. Exemplifying this pattern is the timberland giant Weyerhaeuser, which has absorbed a number of other timber companies and developed into something of a financial services and real estate company. 

The increasingly short term aims have transformed the physical infrastructure itself, and they have shortened the gathering cycles. A harvest has gone down from 50 years or so, which is still a potentially short lifespan for a tree, to a 25 year turnover. As a result, the average tree size has gotten smaller, and the various mills in operation have been tooled for smaller and smaller trees, and then of course more trees have to be harvested to make up for the loss in biomass. 

Clear-cutting is hard on the local ecology: it wipes out habitat, heats up the region, removes windbreak protection and shade from neighboring trees, and the loss of living root systems means the soil is less able to hold water and erodes easier, and so nutrients are lost as well. Further, the heavy machinery tends to destroy the mycelium networks. More trees are planted in favor of the next harvest cycle, but the region itself is steadily impoverished and becomes less diverse. Yes, a whole field of carbon sinks is wiped out, but we have to remember too: older and larger trees are more effective as carbon sinks, so it also results in a generational deterioration of the carbon sinking capacity of entire regions as they are cyclically cut and replanted, and this problem gets worse as the harvesting accelerates and regions of harvest widen as market competition continues to intensify. 

So, the competition: the company conducting this particular harvest was paying one operator (which includes the recouped investment on the machine) to carve out vast swathes of timberland to go to market, and very rapidly. This is a devastating rate of return, and this particular technological complex has been available to the industry for quite some time now. 

The feller buncher makes ruthless economic sense in a world where everyone has access to this machinery, but that economic sense has to be held in relation to the global value chain. A shift from muscle power to machines like this implies centuries of technological development, and the location and control of that development implies centuries more, and even millennia of geopolitical positioning and influence. To have access to that machinery, you have to be rich enough and have the geopolitical permission to do so, and those who do surely do it, facing the matter of what to do with the growing legions of sullen and disaffected labor.  

There is immense global pressure to remain at the top of that value chain, so as to concentrate enough wealth to remain at the cutting edge of that perpetual process of technological revolution. The difference between muscle power and something like this feller buncher machine is simply too vast in terms of time and energy sunk into a given branch of industry. 

Simultaneously as competition continues to advance and intensify, you have an intensification and acceleration of the rates of exploitation, which involve processes of immense social upheaval as whole tranches of labor are thrown into obsolescence, simultaneously as ecologies everywhere continue to degrade. 

The structure of this process is in the process of changing dramatically now, but it is hard to imagine the greater conditions of imperial competition changing anytime soon. 

Rivers

Up in these forested mountains, after a heavy rain, you can hear the roar of the various local streams get going, and then that roar can continue for days or even weeks and months, depending on weather cycles. It is kind of remarkable to think about: all of that water that fell, and the snow higher up that is melting. The ground is saturated and then lets loose from underground springs, and all of that water falls back down via gravity and converges, following paths of least resistance and the memories of previous stream beds, and then flows sustained for some time long after the rains abate. It sounds like wind, or distant traffic flows. Sustained water traffic: distributed falling water becoming established in the land and then succumbing to the magnetism of the earth, concentrating and unifying as it descends, eventually to be dispersed and distributed once again. 

Time and Change

As we well know, behind the concepts and human perceptions of time and space are very strange phenomena indeed, and the relationships between these things can be just as strange and difficult to comprehend and describe. 

Nevertheless there are some indirect ways of representing these phenomena that can yield some interesting observations, which like wind animating the swaying trees, can indicate the flowing of something a little more inscrutable. 

For example, as time slips away, ones relation to change seems to slip with it, much like the relationship of distance with many different kinds of effects. It has been observed by historians that the more distant a given set of historic events and their relations, the more mellow and muted our impressions of such things as observers can be, and the better able we are to analyze such affairs without the attendant prejudice, which though always exists in our perceptions to some extent, at least exists less immediately and intensely as compared to being directly affected by a given event. 

Though even given this general tendency, some impressions can endure for quite a long time indeed. Say, for the people of a once great power, the collective perception and experience of those heights can endure for a long time, with declines and humiliations especially smarting for centuries or even thousands of years. When times get bad for people, you can see all sorts of rationalizations for undertaking some sort of compensatory conquest, with people tracing their lineages back to some illustrious power and arguing for a return to that former glory.

But anyway, it is clear enough that for most events passing through the present and then slipping into history, the intensity and feeling of one's participation in them does peak in closer temporal and spatial proximity to them. For example, discussions of the legacies of someone like Alexander the Great and then someone like Adolf Hitler are going to be very different; even comparing the two could be seen to be fraught and sensitive. And then living in the United States, it is difficult to evaluate someone like Donald Trump or Joe Biden without fielding some sort of personal human impression in the process. 

Part of this could have to do with the nature of thermodynamics of entropy. For the most part we're mostly aware that the flow of time cannot be reversed and that the more time passes, the more things change and the conditions we'd like to alter change with them until eventually the situation is not even recognizable. 

A small amount of spatial distance added to an event typically requires more energy to address it. Simply put, getting up to retrieve the TV remote literally takes more energy than just reaching for it. In the same way, the required energy for addressing a given state of affairs goes up as that state of affairs drifts organizationally further from the original point to be addressed, given that one's aims and intentions in addressing the issue haven't changed. 

This is even bound up in our motivations: if someone insults you there is plenty motivation to retaliate while the insult is fresh, and perhaps their behavior could be changed as a result. The more time passes however, the more internal processing has occurred, the less motivation to directly address the insult, and besides, trying to address it too much later could appear stilted and strange. Individuals do vary of course. 

Anyway, change is real of course. It just takes energy to do and it tends to be time sensitive. If someone steps on your foot and you say, "ow, remove your foot" and they move, that is real and immediate change. The issue gets bigger and more complex though, and more time passes, and well you need more energy to address it then. Past a certain point, it becomes something else entirely. 

Ghosts in Machines Pt. 3

As a more general spiritual phenomenon, and mode of thought, god-thinking could be seen to be a way of thinking that groups and organizes massive movements of infinitely complex relations of reality, to attempt to make sense of profound and massive units of reality which can only be conceptualized in terms of abstract relations and how those relations are felt and experienced. 

You see in religious ideologies and practices a mix of intense spiritual feeling and conviction and complexes of language and concept and image meant to share and harmonize and edify these largely unobservable phenomena, that nevertheless show up and can be observed indirectly in the mass relations of the animated subjects that harbor and experience them, which like a flag billowing in the wind, give the impression of the movement of something ineffable, and which takes a definite shape and character as it unfolds in the material world.  

It is in a way an application of those old toolmaking tendencies of conceptualization, rationalization, and coordination in attempting to understand something far larger and infinitely more complex than mere circumnavigation and persistence in the material world. 

Some historical mentions could help illustrate this. Part of the character of early Islam for example included a deep suspicion that those spiritual feelings and convictions could be shared through image at all, and that attempting to do so would only distract from and corrupt those things, thus lending part of the reason for the Arab antipathy towards iconography, a strain which continues on in Islamic thought today.  

It was the Byzantine military which, after learning to fear the might of Arab forces, and after a slew of military disasters and defeats, were one of the major driving forces pushing for the ideology of iconoclasm in Byzantium throughout the 8th and 9th centuries AD, which sought to emulate Arab spiritual ideology out of the belief that "god" was showing preference to it. It was a way to comprehend the massive, complex, and incomprehensible processes of collapse in the 6th and 7th centuries and provide some sort of ideological motivation and coordination to survive them and deal with them. 

What I like about these examples is how they show ideology and spiritual feeling interacting, a relation which helps to structure the very character of a given god-worshipping culture and society. As we've discussed, these characters take form in time and space in relation to existing states of affairs and change over time and in accordance with changes set in motion by them moving through the material world, and then these formations of complexes can come into contact with one another and influence one another. 

As I mentioned before, the spiritual feeling and conviction that these conceptions and ideologies are built upon have to be participated in. One experiences a given god-form and attempts to conceptualize it and describe it to others feeling and experiencing something similar, either to inculcate that form in a greater level of purity or to collectively coordinate activities that are largely in agreement with the form. The ideology is legitimate if it agrees with what one is experiencing, or it could be the ideology helps to shape what one experiences as well, so long as there is still some agreement. Otherwise the ideology has to be propped up with manipulation, propaganda, social pressure, and even force where experiences don't accord or where individuals are turning away with their different experiences and convictions. 

Again, the participation part of this is very important, and often the most overlooked. In analyzing an external god-form, it is tempting to believe one has risen above the form itself as an uninterested observer, whereas the very observation and analysis and aloofness is taking part within a form of its own. Indeed, this very conception and the discussion taking place here which I am engaging in are rooted in a certain form of consciousness, and so I'm participating in a greater emergent entity we can only be dimly aware of. One still acts in and is shaped by the particular region of time and space one takes up. 

This is how so much of modern conventional discourse condescends to earlier iterations of worship, or else cynically panders to it, while at the same time attempting to force down everyone's throat a fervent worship of that machinelike complex of capital, wage labor, trade, market logic, material domination and expansion, concentrated energy production and consumption, and so on which has dominated the earth for the last couple of centuries, and which increasingly shows its exposed contours as it continues to break down upon reaching its expansionary limits. 

One could see the emerging ecological consciousness and spirituality - and a whole multitude of other alternate vying ideologies emerging like sparks from the grinding plates - possibly taking a greater hold in the future, ever more so in proportion to the growing failures and catastrophes of the present system as it breaks down. We'll most likely get glimmers of illumination and enlightenment before the reconstituted power centers slurp it up into their own machinations, incorporating its truths to buttress their consolidation. But who knows? We are probably in for quite a bumpy and chaotic ride in the coming centuries. 

Snow Before the Melt

 

Rising Mirror

Our species' harnessing of concentrated energy and the creative and destructive powers associated with that may look organized and systematic to our point of view, being that we are the ones controlling such things, but these powers can also appear quite capricious and unpredictable to the nonhuman world. 

Think of anything from the insects bewildered and trapped by our architecture and artificial lighting for example, to the game terrorized and baffled by modern firearm power. How do you as a deer for instance do anything when suddenly something far away claps like thunder and inexplicably strikes your chest with no warning? The best you can do is give such things a wide berth, taking cues from your pack, if you are able to discern them at all. 

The wielders of such power can become bewildered themselves when such powers are turned against them, such as in total war. And this principle is becoming more and more apparent as one watches the increasingly volatile climate issue. 

The weather is getting stranger worldwide and more difficult to predict, with the fumbling forecasts themselves adding to the growing sense of unease. A growing frequency of unpredictable extreme weather events are emerging to bewilder and terrorize everyone caught in them. 

There was a deeper, elemental dynamic here that I wanted to get at. The climate, and the general environment itself, is steadily beginning to mirror the violent capriciousness that one experiences on the receiving side of the application of concentrated energy, a side that much of the nonhuman world and the general environment, and for that matter, the non-imperial world, has been experiencing for some time. For centuries we've been concentrating and expending energy into the general environment, all the while polluting it more and more and tearing apart and scrambling up and setting free whatever parts of it that we haven't been organizing and freezing into place for the benefit of ourselves, and that redirected energy and increasing chaos has been steadily building up over time.  

To take boiling a pot of water, we see that holding a point of heightened excitement - an open flame or a heated coil for example - to a body of water steadily begins to excite the water progressively until the whole body is excited and there is a state change. In the same way, we've been concentrating energy and seizing upon the natural world and reordering it for so long and increasing energy usage with growing speed and scale, that the whole of the environment we're ensconced in is beginning to take on that excited state, bringing the receiving end of that energy back to us and mirrored back to us. 

And to divide and tear something apart is to accelerate that transformation and deepen that feedback. The state of a log or a chunk of ice is much more stable before it begins to break down, each of its breaking off parts combusting or melting with less effort, and adding fuel to the transformative process set against it. 

There is so much wisdom to treating the natural world as extensions of ourselves, non-selfishly of course, more as like kin. And treating it like a thing to be exploited, well, you only get that mirrored back just as faithfully, though the mirror image of that is you on the receiving end. 

A Good Friend

One thing about isolating various influences is that you get to really know the acting influences that you isolate. When times are good, there are a lot of things acting together to produce that goodness; it is more difficult to discern what is benefitting you here, though we should all be so lucky to experience such a state. 

For example, consider the elements that go into a warm and cozy home. If you have decently insulated walls and a space sealed against drafts and the invasion of cold air, the heat source itself fades into the background of the consciousness, especially if you have some sort of gas or electric heating that doesn't need to be supervised. It is all working together and you are comfortable and you are afforded the ability to turn your attention on other things. Again, this is what we actually want. 

When things are going wrong, the thing to do is isolate the effects of what is influencing you, so that you can tell what's good. When your walls are paper thin and the cold is setting in, and you are working with wood fire for example, you really get to know the fire and whether it is good for you or waning and going out. 

You get to know the fire as a close friend: you are constantly gauging its moods, feeding it and tending to it to ensure that it is giving back to you. The performance of the wood is so variable. There are differing variables that contribute to the path it takes to burn. Is it punky (rotten) or firm? Still a little green and full of moisture? Well-seasoned and dense with high BTU? Is the fire hot enough to break down those big chunks? Is it split and combusting quickly? Is it burning hot and clean or wet and smoky? Is it producing hot coals or is it petering out, and etc. 

It takes more work and attention, but when the fire is sustained and humming, and radiating that heat against the encroaching cold, it is good. And it watches over you as you go to sleep; a good friend. 

Results From The Failure of Propaganda

I remember how angry I was in my early 20's when I was unlearning all of the whitewashed history I was crammed with in the course of public schooling. I was doing deep dives into the last couple centuries of colonial and imperial histories, and then recent modern geopolitical developments, and just making myself absolutely sick in the process: my god it was all a lie, we don't give a shit about democracy or human rights or etc. 

But some time has passed, and more information has come in. The bitter cyclical experience of daily life and the apprehension of what tends to exist and persist, coupled with a deeper study of history, and that anger has tempered into a more realistic sentiment: well of course this is the way it works. Empires beget each other almost rhythmically throughout the last couple of thousand years of human history, which proceed to marginalize and destroy foreign peoples. Of course modern empires behave this way too.

This is not to excuse or justify anything. Indeed this is still unacceptable. But the consciousness of this state of play has changed for me. And I think a large part of this is the role of propaganda and the way in which it eventually fails. 

See, there was a time in which mass sensibilities were such that the ruling classes would make open declarations about wiping out so-and-so enemies, and doing extreme violence to them or subjugating them. There has always been propaganda in some form or another, but direct violence was much more acceptable in the ancient world and in the medieval era. Of course all of that bad energy would build up from an empire shitting on everyone around it, which would eventually overtake it in the end. 

There has been a long and complex process - which we've gotten into some before - in which direct violence and expropriation has become more and more unacceptable to the common sensibility in the modern world, but the expansionary and domineering instinct has largely remained, necessitating incredibly time and energy-intensive PR efforts to generate images that mitigate the effects of those motivations.  

It is probably for the better that our ruling classes have to put in a little more PR work before they embark on their smash-and-grabs. And it is a good thing that an average person in the developed world should expect to have some rudimentary set of human rights that are not to be violated, and that this expectation should be a basic guarantee of every society. Something worth aspiring to. Of course as Hannah Arendt observed about the cascading crises of the World Wars, you have to have the resources and state power to guarantee these things, and the mere motivation to guarantee these things can collapse very quickly when the war fever rises. 

Over the last couple of thousand years - and we didn't come out of a vacuum when written and studied history arose, so we could probably assume this goes way back into the deeper history of our species - that expansionary imperial impulse may wax and wane with the power and organization of empires, but it never really goes away. And when it repeatedly comes up against the modern propaganda we've been saturated with, something has to give eventually. 

So oftentimes the first thing to break is the image itself, and the propagandized subject is most immediately exposed to this rupture. So you have a lot of people walking around saying, "It's all a lie, the US is actually an empire." This example is quickly becoming more and more antiquated as public cynicism and distrust deepens, but I think the point has been made. 

The intense anger is less focused on their own personal disenfranchisement and immiseration (though these are certainly strong motivating factors), and more on the broken lie itself, and at that point a lot of personal energy is put into reconstituting a more accurate world picture, which is to be shared and evangelized. 

The silver lining to all this is that some version of the positive vision is cherished and maintained, and you see it show up again and again in radical politics: there is an attempt to reorder localities and in many cases even mass politics in order to bring about a substantiation of that reconstituted image. 

Some realism is healthy, just as it can be just as healthy to have some sort of motivating image to aspire to, without slumping into cynicism on the one hand or charging ahead in thrall of some impossible ideal on the other. 

Ghosts in Machines Pt. 2

So then what is the nature of this concept of god we're loosely talking about? There are multitudes of interpretations: perhaps as many interpretations as there are individuals, which itself undergoes collectively a refining process as the ideas are worked out in an intellectual and priestly class, but which eventually become socially fixed into a dominant discourse, which does complicate our conception without negating it.  

Take for example the culling out of heretics and the hammering out of official Christian church homogeneity, which is eventually codified into law while the concentrated church remained fused with the state. One example I can think of is the treatment of an intellectual like Spinoza who would eventually come along to honestly carry out explorations of the logical endpoint of an omnipresent and omniscient singular conception of "god," by locating that god in everything that exists, thereby disintegrating the basis for a localized emanation of that god, which would thus remove an important rationale for fencing off and controlling that localized emanation. For that he was denounced as a dangerous heretic and atheist by authorities and ostracized as a result. And there were plenty of other examples of that sort of occurrence throughout history. 

So a god is not just an objective, collectively shared image and belief - though the collectively determined form and its nature does matter to the expression and function of a given worshipping society - but also the ongoing relation of all interpretations and transformations taking place in that greater movement, forming a greater personality, which is constantly undergoing change and a feedback with its cosmos. 

That personality is far stranger and dynamic than what any sort of mainstream cosmological vision can describe. The body politic that forms around a given god image is set against itself: where there is dogma there are heretics, who must be culled out as conventional doctrine is hammered out. Nevertheless the totality of this process does have a certain personality, a certain character: you can see it in the institutions, the class striations and class conflict, crime and punishment, mass culture, art and architecture, revolution and war, and the like. 

And the very consciousness that participates in such a personality forms the basis of that personality as well: there are laid back nature gods, wrathful gods of vengeance, jealous gods of catastrophe, ecstatic gods of pleasure, penetrating gods of discrimination and judgment, berserker gods of war, and god-denying rationalists, each with their share of luminous mystics and control freak dogmatists and everything in between, the cumulative effects of which determine an overall participatory consciousness in general. The belief - or disbelief - in a given unifying and organizing god concept, and how to relate to that concept (or entity) as an individual alters the nature of the participation, and what is experienced, and what ultimately manifests as a result. 

This was somewhat of a dense treatment, so I'll let that sit and soon move on to elaborate on a general conception of god forms, sprinkling in some self-criticism and thoughts about modernity and future direction, for good measure.