In the ascendancy of Joe Biden is the ascendancy of the manufactured lie, and the desire for efficacy of the obfuscating image, or a retreat into the false comforts of a creaky status quo which has already wrought great destruction, and which is poised to bring about much more. At the same time it is the ascendancy of manufactured and force fed gruel, of the continued domination of dark money, in the midst of an intensifying pandemic no less. None of these are very good signs.
That this is what many are choosing - and let's be clear, there is a whole ecosystem of organized power encouraging this choice - speaks to a deep and lasting failure of imagination and apprehension. That luminous vision that comes with the hard and steady work of sustained meditation upon the nature of the world, and coming to terms with one's demons, and one's society's demons, is at the same time a curse.
"Vision" in the singular of course sounds cultish or totalitarian, but there are many visions of different natures which can arise in contradistinction to the mythological and imperial Western establishment vision. They arise in different constellations of symbols, cultures, and stories, and may be backed by different sets of values. Some of them may be destructive or even totalitarian and monopolistic in nature, while others, though differing, are perfectly compatible, in that one with a holistic view is given to an open constitution that allows one to understand and communicate with others who may entertain holistic views of their own, and who have that open constitution.
But these visions do take work to cultivate and sustain, and oftentimes, talent. And many are not able to put in the work, or are given to a constitution that doesn't allow for coming to terms, which of course is perpetually encouraged by a large-scale industrial apparatus that hates and fears the vision, a vision which acts as competition to its industrial-scale manipulation and domination of perception and action.
As a result of this, a lonely gulf opens up wide. A relational gulf, a social gulf, which is as wide spiritually as the social gulfs opened up by the violent expansion of the professional individual and the nuclear family across vast distances, embodied by the massive infrastructure sprawls across the North American continent, or for that matter, the far flung economic activity of a global market.
