Of Retrogression
Saturday morning dawns, sunny and temperate — a perfect mid-summer day for the Midwest. There’s no possible summation of the state of things, — no matter the iphone news feed. The extremes attract our attention as the fight or flight trigger is deep, encoded, that instinct for survival yet necessary, even if I cannot imagine a single one of the persons now around me in this Starbucks on an African veldt… That ancient instinct inherited from prehistory…
Salman Rushide is on a ventilator after being attacked, stabbed in the neck while on stage for a speaking engagement, “Republicans” rally around Trump subsequent to the FBI seizure of highly classified documents from his home,… There is war in Ukraine, a paroxism, a ballet of sudden obliteration, or of maiming, or of slow starvation, of the concussion of exploding munitions, or being orphaned, or windowed…? A list of heart rending concatenations of cause and effect would be endless…
The inner child, (do we not all have that persona peering through our eyes) cries silently and pleads: stop, stop stop ! But we simply cannot stop the madness because we are such fragile, so precarious a mammal, given to outbreaks of rage, of desperation, part expression of our ignorance, learned patterns of cowardice-cruelty, and reflection of our will to survive.
STOP, STOP, STOP !
A situation, the actual one
-is of its essence ambiguous.
The double aspect, requires a double interpretation
favorable and unfavorable.
And the ambiguity lies, not in our minds,
but in reality itself.
In the reality itself is contained the twin potencies
of triumph or of death.
There is no reason to deny the reality of progress.
It is more in accordance with facts to hold that
there is no certain progress, no evolution,
without the threat of “involution,” of retrogression.
Life, individual or collective, personal or historic,
-the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger,
of adventure.
It is, in the strict sense of the word,
drama.
-excerpt, The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset p. 79
