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SOCIOPOLITOMETAPHISIQUE-O
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The Birthplace of ChoiceThe thrust of modern society with all of its ills is the removal of sacredness from all things. In our television-driven culture, sacredness is exchanged for brand development. A vestige of sacredness survives as the erotic allure of the product, its commodified "essense": the scent of freshness, the coolness of rugged self-sufficiency, the exoticism of a western adaptation on an ethnic art form.The very concept of sacredness being a removable aspect of a thing is new. If it is a detachable quality, separate from the thing which it inhabits, what is it, really? We experience some revulsion at the sight of a symbol stripped of its proper context, raped of its sacredness. Appropriation of a cultural symbol is a delineation of a multidimensional source material. It seeks to find the emotionally satisfying or titillating part of an intranslatable experience and reproduce that experience in a flattened-out, safe form, for profit in a rapidly changing marketplace whose short attention spans will again drive the push for new sources of coolness and packaged cultural difference. Not only cultural difference, of course, is consumed through branding; "feelings," often nostalgic, 'natural,' safe, clean, peaceful, coherent, and 'right,' are consumed as well. Products marketed toward parents, especially mothers, package feelings of security and harmony. Products marketed toward teenagers package more complex feelings, and often are the most interesting among product groups. Rebellion would be an insuffient term to describe what youth-marketed products sell. Humans, like other animals, have natural tendencies toward insurrection when they perceive their 'whole selves' to be squashed by an external force. Teenagers exemplify this insurrectionary spirit. Their newly found power in the world, coupled with a lack of known precedent for their feelings and their relative lack of the weight of adult responsibility, make them creatures that are dangerous to society, driven by powerful, if chaotic and unguided, forces. As the transition into the twenties occurs, most teenagers adjust their trajectories. All but a few will lack the critical analysis, right circumstances, and courage to navigate a transition into being an adult who is a threat to the established order. The rest of the twentysomethings enter a new product group, one that is less diverse and marketed with less fervor, appropriate to the diminished threat posed by the age group. Twentysomethings' products are 'me generation' products. They're about having it your way, and that it's all about you. The miniscule individual differences exploited by the products in this 'mature' brand-concious self-affirming are so small as to be laughable; what is being sold is not variety in product but the idea of variety. Products for this age group are sleeker and subtler but designed to be noticed; they come in a variety of colors and styles, marketed with an emphasis on the "you're different and you know what you want," theme. They are products designed to support the way that young urban professionals wish to think about themselves: Put-together but still knowing how to get down. 'Whole feelings,' such as being outdoors by oneself in a field on a beautiful day, are delineated to become air fresheners and cleaning supplies; again, what is being sold is an ineffable quality, a sense of the sacred which has been camouflaged so expertly that its allure is no longer traceable, yet it still sells the product. Colors themselves are sacred, mysterious, and beyond scientific apprehension--scientists have know way to measure the experience of seeing a color--and are the most common method of selling a product. In response to this onslaught, there is a counter-initiative, a hippie-anarchocollegiate-modernist attempt to keep experience pure, to protect culture from appropriation, whether for-profit or not; to restore a sense of sacredness by divesting one's life of recognizable brands and products; to avoid the internet and television; to reject consumerism; to put all things back in their rightful places (cultural symbols with their rightful cultures; a deliberate attempt to avoid verbally or actively appropriating an understanding of anothers' experience.) This effort often has a distinctly tight and panicked undertone--doing things right to keep things right, at least a little bit--but the tenseness comes from the dynamic of one step toward order for every two toward entropy, with capitalism's reckless entreaties into the sacredness of cultures not due to end anytime soon. The attempt at protecting and isolating cultures, classes, and experiences from hostile incursion by the image-sellers is a holdout in the face of inevitability in the same way that some try to maintain an illusion of racial purity or a nationalist agenda of stemming immigration. All of our symbols, in every corner of the globe, are if not already sold, sellable. There is nothing that cannot be accessed, run through the machine of image-branding, and sold to some market somewhere. No thing on Earth or in space is safe, and any amount of protection of that image will not come close to guaranteeing its sovereignty. There is no vestige of sacredness. Image spectacles, such as television, are great equalizers: they make everything equal, and equally meaningless, ripping away a sense of self-importance, personal and cultural soveriegnty, and symbol-attached sacredness. Television says "No, not this [this is not where sacredness is]," "No, not this either," by a constant and systematic whoring of symbols, feelings, and desire. The mysterious "enchanted quality" attached to a given cultural symbol is efficiently and continuously prostituted. As the image spectacle constantly affirms, "No, not this or this or this," is safe or sacred, gradually all symbols are divorced from meaning. Although we may fight it, and may by chance retain victories throughout the rest of human life on earth, capitalism has at least the capacity to divest God (holiness) from everything over time. What is sorely missed in the struggle against this de-enchantment of the world is a realization of the implication of the separability of sacredness from objects. If sacredness is not invested in any object particularly, sacredness must be something else, an indefinable quality inherent nowhere or everywhere. While monks in meditation may focus on one idea as being the definition of God, self, or holiness, only to dismiss it by saying, 'No, not that," we live this experience non-stop from birth to the grave. Life is nothing more than the constant violation of our believed knowledge, the assurance that none of the things we have thought of are really true. In this pyramid of semi-truths, we ascend from one non-truth to another, better and more advanced non-truth. Total severability is life's golden rule: There is nothing that cannot be, and by virtue of inevitability, already has been, broken; intactness is only a happenstance occurance, an illusion of continuity derived from a glimpsed snapshot of a universe in constant flux. The rape of meaning by capitalism is, in every sense, a violation of our most sacred tenants as human beings. A world of culture and a world of capitalism are like the difference between a living thing and its dissected corpse. The violated, revolted sensation generated in many thinking people by capitalism is the same as the feeling generated by seeing a live animal reduced to so many composite parts. No wonder the high co-incidence of vegetarianism and anarchism. No wonder the initiated shaman sees zirself as a body made of bones, picked clean by spirit animals. When we are stripped, divorced from the wholeness we have held so dear, we begin to build or to find a new wholeness, a better semi-truth, a subtler and wider mind and worldview. It is only through the divestment of sacredness from all things we have held dear and the violation of every tenant of our worldview that we arrive at the window of human enlightenment. If we hang on to that which is holy, locked in a moralistic embrace with the departing fragments of old-world purity and rightness, we fail to be fully present in the dynamic, changing, fully real and human world unfolding everywhere, the excitement and beauty and terror of the earth we truly live on, at least in one semi-truth. When we finally surpass that righteous, hopeless embrace with goodness [for no matter how tightly and nuerotically we grip, she is slipping away like sand] and surrender to the world-that-truly-is, we finally and fully understand ourselves to be free agents, alone and joyously at one with a world beyond comprehension. We can decide to save this world at this point, should we desire, or to destroy it utterly and begin again somewhere else, in another time. I think you might decide to save it, and whatever you decide is okay with me. That is the birthplace of choice.
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