“An age of endarkenment. The world is aflood with dark psychic fluid – everything’s stained with it. We say we hate the stuff, but we don’t act that way, we splash in it.” – Michael Ventura (1990)
The assembled thoughts herein are signed “Assembler447” because the idea of an “author” implies creativity, whereas the products herein have been put together by someone who has never had an original thought. They are quite literally an assemblage of other peoples’ ideas and words. What they attempt to do is simply connect dots between ideas actual authors have previously established while attempting to bypass the ad hominem emotionalism that is intrinsic to the modern Cult of Personality.
The general motivation behind them is the well-recognized fact of Americans’ historical illiteracy. Because any society or civilization is expressed in five dimensions – the three dimensions of space, the fourth dimension of time, and a fifth dimension of highly complicated cultural abstractions – society can be comprehended only in such terms. This is true when any society is flourishing, as America (and the West) once did, and especially so when it is foundering, as is so obviously the case now. Therefore, historical illiteracy necessarily creates a blindness regarding the fourth dimension of any culture’s expression, inevitably sowing widespread confusion about why the present is the way it is simply because we are unaware of the path we have taken to arrive at our current condition.
This same myopic “presentism” also begets an inability to identify the sources of social mal-adaptations whose symptoms have become disturbing clear. Historical illiteracy is thus collective memory loss – a Cultural Alzheimer's disease – where appropriate reforms become impossible because root determinants of our darkening condition lie generally unrecognized. The result has been – inevitably must be – what Eric Hoffer described over seventy years ago in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements:
“The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.”
Public discourse is America today is the cacophonic product of assorted tribalistic radical and reactionary followers fearfully lost in the presence‘s dark woods, oblivious as to how they became so disorientated, yet emotionally predisposed to follow any tribal alpha-character (usually male) possessing sufficient charismatic appeal to claw their way to the top of one of the Darwinian mammalian social structures that proliferate during what Robert Nisbet called “Twilight Ages” – which represent decivilization. These followers become increasingly willful and assertive, despite their incomprehension about how they became lost, believing they have identified the pied piper who can illuminate the proper path out of the dark. They have become the “True Believers” portrayed by Hoffer: “For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.”
