Plague Journal, More Perversion
The requirement of this thought is double and contradictory.
It does not consist in analyzing the world to extract from it an improbable truth. It does not adapt itself dialectically to the facts and abstract from them some logical construction.
It is much more subtle than that, and more perverse as well.
This thought consists in putting into place a form, a matrix of illusion and disillusion, a strange attracting force, so that a seduced reality will be able to spontaneously feed on it.
This thought will also be implacably self-fulfilling (you just have, from time to time, to displace the “object” a bit). Indeed, reality only asks to be submitted to hypotheses, so that it can fulfill all of them: this is reality’s own trick and vengeance.
— excerpt Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard
What could this mean? These lines penned by Baudrillard… He is speaking about the nature of thought. He suggests that thought is a trickster, a perverse master of illusion, a shape-shifting, self-fulfilling entity… The mind originates a matrix such as for example the great notion of Plato’s that reality is a collection of perfect forms of everything that we experience, (nothing left out) ideals which reside “somewhere” accessible to our minds/reason, but not to our experience. Experience always falls short, is less than ideal, just a crude copy, etc., etc.. Just try to draw a perfect triangle…
Plato’s schema is actually quite elegant. The Greco Roman Mediterranean world was seduced and fed upon Platonism for a few hundred years. Christianity comes along — “displace,” shift the object (Platonism) a bit and walla! The frame work for orthodox Christian theology is ready-made: the strict asceticism, despising of “this sinful world,” anticipating the end-of-the-world, with the return of the Lord Jesus from heaven, and all of that… The pantheon of the old gods recedes, Christianity is what comes next.
Several thousand years later come the enraged, disillusioned evangelicals. But wait, the tale is not finished. The latest iteration, QAnon conspiracy devotees, actively promoting, organizing to bring on the “end-of-the-world.”
You’d have to go far to top this nasty, absurdist joke ! Platonism’s elegance transformed to gibberish…
I am not going to summarily make an exit, leaving you with such a dark notion in mind. That would be cruel. This song is enough to see us through the day. True Heaven Is A Place On Earth by Belinda Carlisle.
