#110 PLEASURE

STUCK IN A LOW BALL LOCAL BLACK SITE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

T

he collective often finds guilt in the unwelcomed shadows forming in the time drop between moments where opportunities for pleasure have become stalled.

The dead drop truth of the day is that individuals want more than anything to find harmony, and that people search for that metaphysical sweet spot from the very start of the day onward.

Individuals may be compelled to find harmony subconsciously. In most situations, the path of least resistance presents as far more pleasurable than the most obviously unpleasant alternative.

Few individuals may find what they are searching for, though, in those precious few hours that are left after sunrise, because life inside and outside and throughout can be complicated – often unpredictably complicated from hour to hour, and almost certainly never easy. Perhaps life, even quite more often than one might like, becomes a bit more complicated than the day before.

Of course, of course the world is not collapsing in the sense of immediate catastrophic events. Despite the sceptics though, the signs of the impending doom often fantastically appear everywhere, a bit more randomly anywhere, at anytime, as part of a psychotropic realtime experience.

Time is so precious, but wasting time is common when civilization begins to shutter, like time wasted in the daily commute, in the line ups quibbling about the pay machine not reliably taking your pay card, or yammering unresponsively about one problem or another when the search results do not provide the answers you were interested in finding online.

The recuring collapse of these micro events throughout the day is just one tell tale sign. Repeatedly having to look for a new beginning in the rubble is another indication of a much more serious problem on the horizon. ‘If I can just get through these next few hours, tomorrow will be much better.’

Fleeting time poses even more of a problem when the search for harmony becomes a conscious one. People are constantly reminded that time is limited, especially when confronted with unsatisfactory search results.

The world stops suddenly more and more now to watch the climate storms. The ordeal consumes a lot of time, just by innocence alone watching the uncontrolled devastation.

Social responsibility has a bit to do with those uneasy feelings. Individuals knowingly benefit from inclusion, but with that belonging to a greater community comes responsibility, not just for individual conduct but for the overall state of society.

That burden that pulls from inside the subconscious may be greatest now because of the signs everywhere of the impending collapse of certain aspects of civilization. Civilization may yet survive, but only with people hunkering down between the clock clicks and the bell chimes of the days ahead.

Those days ahead will take on different forms than that which humanity endures today.

The doom perspective becomes hedged against the almost simultaneously examples of great successes. The contrast creates a lot of uncertainty, one way or the other way, because success shapes and controls and censors the public information about the state of civilization.

These subtilties of the divergent outcomes pulls from inside the collective unconscious.

The archetypes have a lot of influence as universally appealing assimilationist traits to which humanity clings, ultimately running the show in the deep background, unbeknownst to the masses, at least when everything goes well.

When the day collapses, that global collective comes together out of a shared victimization – because of the archetypes and because of universally shared natural law and legal rights that take various incantations based on the level of freedom and democracy.

And then the natural law becomes overwritten on mass by those common cries for freedom coming from within. ‘No, you can’t do that anymore – at least not in that way.’

‘Don’t touch me.’

Collective victimization is a sharing of the effects of a civilization falling into disrepair. People residing in different parts of the ecosystem experience similar trauma in the same way from the collapse of the global superstructure.

Civilization does not just mean living together and sharing great ideas and great art, but in sharing responsibility for the outcome of whatever end goal people strive toward, day in and day out.

A factory creates jobs, but the machines that make the business profitable cause CO2 emissions.

People do want to find harmony in love and in work and often in God, perhaps more often in love with some people and more often in God in others, and maybe in work.

The deeply held longing for inner peace consumes many of those recuring empty hours when people are not working or not making love and not praying.

These three personal motivators compel community dynamics throughout the day. When people are not working, they are making love, and when they are not making love, they are praying. Moments away in other places and doing other activities may indicate that someone has become truly lost – and then the need for harmony becomes more of a conscious search.

If you’re still trying to figure life out, watch another sunrise, and then get going on one of the three aforementioned harmonies.

The great transformation of civilization occurred when the agrarian economy shifted from machines being of some assistance to machines becoming a dominant player during the Industrial Revolution. The shift continued until the power balance between workers and machines became altered towards machines and the capitalist who own the machines.

And not much has changed since then – the dynamics of humanity and machines has only intensified.

Machines made civilization more possible by improving everything to such an extent that people eventually came to work for the machines, putting parts together on a figurative or literal assembly line set at a pace at which the machines could function.

This driving force of machines has accelerated exponentially during the electronic information age and the online world of information exchange and commerce. Machines now make computations beyond the means of individuals, forever changing the profit margins and the selection process of who and what benefits.

People have become relegated to putting their digital data into the machine and waiting expectantly for a proportionate output in return, like a slot machine at a casino.

The response might be positive. The response might also just as well be negative. And too often there might be no response received at all. ‘It’s a machine.’

People have been brought closer together within civilization, despite geographic distance, by the online machines. The shared natural laws and the archetypes continue to compel people together behind universal ideas that transcend politics.

The search for inner harmony is no more successful than before, though. That civilization still struggles with unemployment, hunger, and if you look far and wide long enough, homelessness and mass poverty.

The hours spent earning wages can become instantly devalued by inflation, economic displacement, and shortages of essential goods, such as nutritious food and clean safe water.

If everyone played fair, civilization might have produced equality, but the quest for harmony has become manipulated, like everything else, for other players to gain an advantage and to take a profit.

People succeed by being more harmonious, in social media appearances at least, than the rest of humanity. People continue to succeed, and people continue to suffer, while the planet declines even more.

The waste generated through this process may be inconsequential to the rich, but nevertheless cheats the poor. And wasting planetary resources, cheats everyone.

Humanity moves and is moved incrementally toward that black spot where an entire decade may fall asunder, and perhaps, even before an awareness of how fleeting time can be, an entire century passes.

The laws of attraction become betrayed by the online provider, the programmer, the user, the seller and the consumer in search of an advantage – ultimately a profit margin that becomes converted into a stock option. But the day has disappeared, only to return in a different form, one day short of where you were yesterday.

The e-machines now draw down the days’ events, while the profit formula continues to provide primary motivations.

The profit formula continues to provide motivation.

People prefer to work, and frequently move forward through the hours of the day without having to be reminded about their social responsibilities. One person may have found more harmony with less, than the other person whose bearings wobble a bit under the heavy burden of having too much.

The inner harmony built up by working, loving and praying spreads around the world unevenly.

And when all the proper and good impulses become corrupted, and real evil begins to surface again, the whole world suffers together. No one is ever prepared for that rather unflattering version of humanity that emerges from the shadows, but past time suggests the inevitability of at least the occasional recuring appearance.

We should not all feel guilty for someone else’s betrayal – them having become corrupted without our presence. But the failings of civilization should also not go unnoticed.

Individuals have a responsibility to resist the rise of the less flattering counterfeit copy of humanity that begins with subtle innocuous surfacings in pools of light.

The collective must remain vigilant for the emergence of that unusually dark shadow.

Social oversight should not be arbitrary and absolute either. Collective punishment is not acceptable because the offending community often includes individuals with various degrees of culpability, and more often than not a lot of last chance innocence learning to survive the madness, such as innocent children who more than likely have not yet developed a will of their own.

People can be conditioned to do right and to do wrong. And machines can be programmed either way.

The subconscious becomes a powerful ally, often as much for evil as for good when individuals become a bit better motivated by the need for personal security, including income security.

But individuals always have a choice not to join the angry mobs forming outside in the city streets and along the corridors of time when everything good or bad begins to go down. In these situations, harmony can be obtained with less.

Collective forgiveness does not mean to forget – but nor does such an approach to harmony support arbitrary punishment. Collective punishment carries the grave risk of punishing the innocent, which, civilization has decided long ago, is a much worse outcome than letting a guilty person to escape.

These basic legal rights are as important as the natural law that protects humanity from the intrusions into personal security that occurs when evil surfaces.

A lot has to do with the way societies are organized to work in tiered consciousnesses. Class still has privilege even after the hereditary monarchies and capitalist empires have become replaced by independent democratic nation states.

The power of deterrence, and denunciation, can still hold one accountable for the actions that affect the other one. Individualized punishment has more power as a deterrent because of the breathtaking singularity of purpose.

The individualized application of punishment protects the innocence among us. This accountability also deters the collective and generates much better long term outcomes than collective punishment because of the overall universal pursuit of the three harmonies. People do not want to be angry. People want to be happy.

From time to time humanity has an epiphany – this life is clearly wrong – or this way of providing is just nuts. This reversal that may occur in time to save civilization may take quite different forms in sorting everything out, with innocence being so fragile.

The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, Edited by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1983.