Much of how we see the world is decided before we look. I constantly marvel how many typos I detect when editing these blogs only after the sixth or seventh re-reading. This is simply due to the fact that I tend to see what I am expecting should be there. Only after the seventh examination might I notice what actually is there. Even without referring to extensive psycho-biological studies on cognition, most of us are already convinced of the power of expectation on experience.
This is where the renegade philosopher interrupts what seems like a foregone conclusion: that whatever I thought was there the first six times had no effect on the actual typed reality. Whatever the limits of human subjectivity, objective fact remains both separate and stable. Rogue philosophy asks apparently annoying and unnecessary questions like “So who can determine what actually is there? And is anything there at all? Perhaps we are all simply trapped in our thoughts and interpretations. How can you convince someone of what is there if they have no perception of it?
Then come the ideologues to settle the question and unhitch the cartwheel of human function temporarily disabled by undue introspection, supplying authoritative frames of reference for every human question under the sun with quotes from religious or academic texts or whatever popular canons of wisdom and knowledge from Google and Natural Geographic (or whatever Journal of repute) to the Bible, the Gitas or the I-Ching. We choose our facts as well as our values in the same way we choose our news networks or cell phones. Our realities depend on whether we are Digicel or Flow customers, whether we listen to Fox or MSNBC, whether we worship with the SDA or SBC churches.
I am acutely aware of not only the questions, but also the answers being provided in various spaces: academic, religious, cultural, etc. And the answers often differ widely with locus. The tendency is to cultivate tribal identities in modern metropolitan space. We trade goods with all, but ideas only with the clan, making the merchant and banker the new King of the world, where Money ruleth all, but none will admit to it, except perhaps the Financial High Priests, experiencing an esoteric world of fact and value superseding all political and religious bias.
If death indeed be the last enemy, poverty and the inflation that augments it may well be the penultimate. In a world where increasingly less and less people seem prepared to kill or die for God or country, and whatever each should stand for, and more prepared to sacrifice whatever sacred cows the Dollar God requireth, reality is indeed being slowly reconstructed along entirely new lines and boundaries than heretofore familiar, and ever so increasingly, it is appearing that the Dollar God favoreth only a few devout worshippers, while the rest of humanity may indeed rot in hell. Not even is human labor a bargain-worthy commodity, high-tech now capable of replacing it in large swaths. Both the state and the masses it caters to seem bound to become not only burdensome, but dispensable.
Whether it be Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Congo, or Tibet, (coming soon to a theatre near you) Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Indigenes; political and religious ideologues (and activists) mired in sectarian subjectivity do really need to produce new grand visions for human communal potential and capacity, giving fresh meaning to the eternal pursuit of Truth and Justice, lest the only playbook in town with teeth and weaponry become the Monopoly version of the Art of War.
YeKengalé 