“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.” — Paul Valery
There is not much I can add to this election season, except for more fodder for the burnout. I have become more adept at avoiding the noise in order to hone in on the signal. My question as to where I want to focus my attention is: will it matter in 10 years? I have probably seen hundreds of newscasts and clickbait stories over the years that have completely left the memory banks and had no lasting impact other making the monkey mind more manic at times. While I have books that I still point to from a decade ago that mean something to me and have left an imprint in my soul. Sure, I can’t remember much detail from some of those reads, but that’s why we highlight the high points.
I suppose politics does matter to a point; but it is always downstream from culture; and that is downstream from metaphysics (which shapes our values and virtues); which is ultimately downstream from Divinity. So that’s why I am going with the flow of this election season, and will only endorse what matters. I do not believe a Clinton or a Trump will matter in the greater scheme of things, even if I do have my unenthusiastic leanings.
Most people, myself included, can be reductive with their thinking as to how we solve worldly problems. We can’t even agree on the problems: where one side views ISIS as the greatest threat, the other side sees it as climate change. Truthfully, our secular solutions won’t solve our spiritual problems, and I think most of our problems are of a spiritual nature. This doesn’t mean I am not interested in how the world works (I am very interested in that!), but I am not very interested in how it should work. Who am I to say what would be best? Sure, I have some preferences and principles. But I realize that there is danger in concretizing either. Preferences are my own subjective whims. And my principles are an aid to my reasoning, but not a replacement for it. My principles can guide my thinking, but once I believe that they must be rigidly applied in any context without further thought to all circumstances, then all I have done is transformed any redeeming wisdom I may have into an ideology. And most political discourse these days is ideology mixed in with some dog-fighting.
So, what essentially would I like to see happen beyond what policy could offer? A spiritual revival with mystical/metaphysical rigor would be a good start. It seems we have lost the desire for a relationship with the Divine, and therefore man has to do all the heavy lifting himself. But mass culture doesn’t even take responsibility for the lifting these days, but now relies on the state to do it. And once the state screws it up, we then look to the next leader to steer the ship. The currents continue to flow, but we resist hoping to arrive at some utopian end state that will never be.
As Bob said, “the trouble is, no one looks at things from a cosmic perspective, so trivial things appear huge while massive objects are rendered invisible.” What will it take to render the invisible visible? I’m not sure, but I’d vote for it.