Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

 
 Theocratic fear-mongering; photo and posterization by Loren Bliss copyright 2010. (Olympus RC; Kodak 400 color negative film.)

A FEW DAYS AGO I became involved in a virtual discussion on the website Common Dreams that prompted me to revisit in unusual depth some of the core concepts I had first explored in the forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.”

As regular readers here already know, “Dancer” was a book of text and photographs, the culmination of a 24-year research project (1959-1983) that proved the 1960s Counterculture to be a genuine “revolution in consciousness”: the spontaneous resurrection of the ancient goddess-centered ethos seemingly reduced to insignificance by the sack of Knossos and notably without influence in human affairs ever since. The late and notably influential editor Cicely Nichols believed “Dancer” would revitalize the Counterculture by providing it the solidarity of definition and vocabulary it had hitherto lacked. But just as the work seemed on its way to major publication, it was obliterated by fire – almost certainly arson – and the resultant psychological devastation not only ruined my life but effectively silenced me forever.

Because the process of focusing on this material typically evokes so much of the anguish of the original loss – the fire destroyed all my research and interview notes and nearly all my photographs – I have long tended to flinch from the depth of reflection mandated by my contributions to this particular Common Dreams thread. But for the last few days, as I responded to Common Dreams' troubling disclosures about the latest atrocities in the U.S. war on reproductive and sexual freedoms, the process of recalling and refining the contents of “Dancer” was curiously pain-free, as if I had somehow been granted momentary psychological dispensation. The result – now further edited for additional clarity – is below; the Common Dreams thread is linked here:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/09/03-2

NOTE HOW -- as capitalism marches its entities forward to full constitutional personhood -- women are forced backward to nonpersonhood and total subjugation.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Just as Christianity and Islam are the direct descendants of the hitherto alien patriarchal savagery that conquered the planet by exterminating the inconceivably ancient cultural ethos we know today as Minoan, so is capitalism the direct derivative of the savagery embodied in Christian theology.

Note the progressions:

From Goddess as mother of us all to God the divine dictator, God the royal tyrant, God the heavenly Führer, God the chief executive officer whose egotistic favoritism, greed, hatefulness and sadism determine even the minutia of how we live and die.

God, king, Führer, CEO -- to facilitate His alien conquest and His triumphant tyranny, our human consciousness is methodically blinded: the Gaean reality of the cosmic and Earthly womb is tabooed forever; Nature is proclaimed the enemy; the physical universe once defined as the sacred living flesh of the Mother is not only purged of divinity but reduced to dead matter valued only for its profitability; the once superior female gender is not only overthrown and reduced to chattel but defined as the source of all evil.

Whether headed by priest, king, Führer or CEO, God appoints the übermenschen of His Select, the Communion of the Saved, to rule with zero tolerance over all of us He proclaims members of the Legion of the Damned. We are thus cursed as üntermenschen: all of us who are pagans, rebels, heretics, agnostics, witches, scientists, abominations, revolutionaries, disabled, unemployed -- all of us who dare question His edicts.

See the connections?

See how Christianity inevitably becomes Capitalism?

See how Capitalism -- infinite greed as maximum virtue; limitless selfishness as ultimate good -- inevitably becomes Nazism?

The Third Reich was the dress rehearsal for tomorrow, crushed not for its atrocities but for its revelations of true capitalist reality.

Yeats saw it all too clearly: "And what rough beast, it's hour come round at last..."

Comes now the Fourth Reich, God's War against Woman and Nature institutionalized. Forever.

*****

DUE TO SHORTAGES of time and space I omitted several important points from my original Common Dreams post. Ergo:

(1)--The transition from patriarchy through Christianity and Islam to capitalism and finally to fascism is historical proof that ideas have consequences. It is perhaps our most telling example of the idea-to-reality process in action. It is also a vivid illustration of the dynamic that fuels history – the interaction of cause and effect.

(2)--The pivotal function of the god-concept in this process becomes evident only when we are able to transcend the (deliberate?) distractions of conflicts over the existence of the divine. Distancing ourselves from the associated doctrinal warfare – and warfare is precisely what it is – is extremely difficult in a de facto theocracy like the United States. But it is well worth the effort; only from such distance can we view the concept of god – any god – with enough objectivity to examine its psycho-dynamic and psycholinguistic functions. Only then can we see that – no matter whether god is objectively real or not – god is a primary art symbol, an ultimate human symbiosis, a concentrate formed by the interaction of self and other, with “other” defined to include the entire cosmos and everyone/everything within it. God is therefore both a blueprint for society and an ever-evolving summation of what that society believes to be true. Descriptions of god or divine essence – Christendom's “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before Me”; Islam's “There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is His prophet”; the First Nations' concept of “Great Holy Mystery”; Asia's “the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao”; Minoan society's presumptive “In the beginning was the Mother and She gave birth” – reveal not just the principles that shape our behaviors but the direction, intent and probable destination of the societies in which we live.

(3)--History, archaeology and anthropology show humanity's original gods to have been female. The original social and familial structures were matrifocal and/or matrilineal (if not matriarchal); the original human economies were various forms of proto-communism. Because the psycho-dynamic impulses that govern human consciousness seem to have changed very little (if at all) during our species 100,000-plus years of existence, we can hypothesize a mutually sustaining relationship between god, society and individual essentially identical to that prevailing today, with each of these elements – then as now – in their characteristic albeit gradual states of flux.

Our hypothesis is confirmed by what we know of the societies in question -- information gleaned via history, anthropology, archaeology, folklore and myth. Minoan civilization is especially relevant here because of the archaeological evidence that strongly suggests it was a widespread, possibly even pan-European fruition of the incalculably ancient tribal societies that preceded it. Thus – despite intensifying censorship by the capitalist Ruling Class – Minoan civilization has emerged as a definitive archetype of its era and kind. Though capitalist archaeologists are loathe to admit it, Minoan cities had neither slums nor mansions. The structures capitalist archaeologists deceptively label as “palaces” were more likely to have been administrative centers and are in fact so catalogued by researchers who are exempt from capitalism's overpowering need to propagandize greed and hierarchy as human norms. Meanwhile the existence of a powerful, effective and definitively humanitarian Minoan administrative apparatus – exactly the sort such structures might house – is proven beyond argument by the successful evacuation of Thera.

Indeed the Minoans' matrifocal, ecocentric religion and their proto-communist infrastructure are increasingly regarded as the apex of human achievement, not merely of the Bronze Age but of all time. The lifespan of Minoan civilization is genuinely breathtaking: despite a seeming defenselessness proven by its astonishing lack of fortifications and other military structures, the Minoan realm endured well over a thousand years before its fatal weakening by an inconceivably destructive volcanic debacle – probably the worst such disaster in all human experience. And Minoan governance may have extended far beyond the Mediterranean. Based on a combination of perplexing archaelogical evidence and a curious line of British poetry at least six centuries older than the Royal Navy – Taliesin's “I have sung before the ruler of Britain, abounding in fleets” – Bronze Age Britain may have been a Minoan province.

(4)--When we apply the same analytical principles to patriarchy – male supremacy symbolized by a male god (a concept that seems to have remained alien until the Theran debacle and its apocalyptic aftermath, which was no doubt taken as proof the goddess had failed or turned hostile) – we again see the importance and function of the god concept: how humanity defines god and how that definition shapes humanity.

Rejecting god as the nurturing mother who loves us all as children of her divine womb – the goddess whose body is the universe (a concept eerily reborn in the Gaea Hypothesis) – we emerge from the tsunami-drowned and Achaean-sacked ruins of Knossos to kneel in terror before a god who has become the ultimate abusive father: the Nature-hating misogynist who loves only his Chosen (those who have proclaimed themselves his children) and so despises all the rest he condemns us to eternal damnation – psychologically the most terrifying concept ever articulated.

God the Father thus becomes god the Führer; the collective humanitarian consciousness of proto-communism is overthrown by the malevolence of greed and hierarchy (contrast the evacuation of Thera with the abandonment of New Orleans); human society is divided into the anointed (and therefore Saved) aristocracy of god's übermenschen and the damned (and therefore infinitely exploitable) slave-pen üntermenschen of everyone else.

As I described above, capitalism is the inevitable consequence – just as fascism is the inevitable fulfillment of capitalism.

*****

WE ARE ALREADY OPPRESSED by Christian theocracy. We rarely see it because it is mostly theocracy cloaked in euphemisms and imposed with the same stealth used to gradually boil a frog. One especially outrageous example is the ongoing subversion of the separation of church and state, as by the malicious refusal of Christian pharmacists to sell birth control – their fanatical tyranny suddenly defended as “religious freedom.” Another example of encroaching theocracy is the extension of “free speech” to protect the lies and violence inherent in Christianity's war against science, secular society and liberty itself. No doubt to further obscure its intensifying oppressiveness, U.S. theocracy is also carefully camouflaged by “political correctness” – for example the taboo against speculating on the connection between Sen. Harry Reid's role in torpedoing health-care reform and his beliefs as a Mormon Elder.

No doubt all these disguises will be stripped away in 2012, when Moron Nation elects Palin/Beck and the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy will be formally ended as a result, probably by the same emergency decree with which President Palin declares herself the de facto Führer of the de facto Fourth Reich. Congress, which by then will be as tautly controlled by the Teabaggers and GOPorkers as the Weimar Reichstag was controlled by the Nazis in 1933, will no doubt add its rubber-stamp of approval, at which point a New Inquisition will begin the nation's theological cleansing even as the more definitively secular Department of Homeland Security unleashes its geheime staatspolizei on all political dissidents.

Not that DemocRat victories this year and in 2012 would make any long-term difference; given the inevitable progression of capitalism – especially capitalism in a time of dwindling resources and ecological crisis – the transition of the United States to a Fourth Reich is as inevitable as death. The serial betrayals inflicted by Obama and the DemocRats are re-creating the hopelessness that fueled the rise of the Nazi Party and destroyed the Weimar Republic – now as then a process financed by U.S. Big Business and thus the obvious fulfillment of Ruling Class intent. Whether via the next two national elections or those of 2014 and 2016, there is no doubt the tyrannosauric forces of capitalism are terminating the American experiment in constitutional democracy and crushing forever the Working Class aspirations embodied in the American Dream.

In this context the economic purpose of theocracy is imposition and perpetuation of the slave mentality essential to ensure permanent submissiveness to oppression. Christian theocracy's primary weapon is fear – specifically the truly infinite fear of eternal damnation – psychologically the most abjectly terrifying concept ever articulated. Thus – cleverly abetted by the spreading cancers of permanent unemployment, destruction of government services and Moron Nation ignorance – Working Class expectations are methodically downsized to fit the slave-pens of the future: “will work for food and shelter.” 

Though theocracy itself is ancient, the effectiveness of its modern form was perfected in the U.S. South, where post-Civil War experiments in governance by the Ruling Class demonstrated how Christian theocracy could provide a near-absolute barrier to humanitarian activism and even to such aspirations, whether in the workplace or society in general.

Christian churches thus became brain-police installations. The consequences include:

--The South's unique history of racial bigotry, misogynistic brutality and savage resistance to organized labor (note the polite Southern euphemism for the Ku Klux Klan: “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class”);

--The post-King nullification of the Civil Rights Movement – note not only the emergence of national racism in the wake of the Katrina atrocities but the Palin/Beck co-optation of the Civil Rights Movement;

--The nationwide metastasis of theocracy itself, proven by the spread of Christian fanaticism throughout the U.S.

Acknowledgement of the third trend was the real message in Barack the Betrayer's appointment of the rabidly misogynistic and homophobic theocrat Rick Warren to give the 2009 inaugural invocation -- the equivalent of the keynote address at a political convention.

(Relevant aside: Though the Left suicidally dismisses the capitalist Ruling Class as a cabal of greed-blinded dunces, history proves it to be the diametrical opposite: in truth the most diabolically cunning, selfishly malevolent, murderously adept elite ever. Now – because of its wealth, criminal skill and mastery of technology – it is empowered for the remainder of human time: that is. until our species is extinct.)

Meanwhile the true extent of present-day theocratic oppression becomes far more apparent if we examine how the DemocRats' economic policies abolish Working Class reproductive rights. While the GOPorkers launch legislative and judicial assaults on reproductive freedom, the 'Rats attack it economically, methodically exploiting the weakness inherent in the fact all U.S. reproductive rights are predicated on the availability of adequate health insurance – that is, insurance that supports female reproductive independence. While the Ruling Class is ensured by its inconceivable wealth, such insurance is available to the Working Class only as a condition of employment. Hence job-losses inflicted by the 'Rats' so-called “free market” policies are as effectively anti-choice as any outright abortion ban. Add the birth control prohibitions imposed by welfare regulations and Obamacare mandates plus Obamacare's implicit war on employer-provided health insurance and what emerges is a political truth the 'Rats try desperately to keep secret: the fact their pro-choice rhetoric is a Big Lie; that the economic consequences of 'Rat free-trade policies and domestic legislation – downsizing, outsourcing, welfare restrictions, Obamacare – prove the 'Rats every bit as misogynistic as the bible-thump GOPorkers. It is surely no accident that soon only the richest women – only the pampered daughters, wives and mistresses of the Ruling Class – will be allowed any reproductive freedom at all. 

WHEN I CONTEMPLATE the history of patriarchy and its progression through Christianity to capitalism thence to fascism and ultimately to the extinction of all human life, I find myself wishing I were skilled at writing fiction, which I am not. No doubt because I am dyslexic, my successful flights of creative imagination are limited to visual media: these days chiefly photography and collage. But if I were a novelist, what an epic of science fiction I could write:

Imagine a universe policed by a humanoid species eons older than ourselves, inconceivably more technologically advanced (and therefore capable of light-speed travel), but a species that for all its scientific mastery is terrified by the long-term potential of any similar species emerging elsewhere across the galaxies. Indeed this species – call it “Forenazi” – fears any counterpart species exactly as post-Islamic-Invasion Europeans feared the inhabitants of other continents and sought to enslave these indigenous peoples as colonial subjects lest the indigents rise to invasive power exactly as the Muslims had done c. 700 CE. Hence the Forenazis patrol the cosmos, exterminating all potential rivals, and over the hundreds of thousands of years of their cosmic despotism, they perfect their Final Solution so that it becomes indistinguishable from “natural” causes. Eventually the Forenazis reconnoiter our own solar system. Mars is lush with life, including humanoids at the brink of interplanetary travel; the Forenazis somehow destroy the Martian atmosphere, reducing the planet to desert. But the Forenazi overlords remain fearful some Martian humanoids might have escaped to Earth; hence millions of years later another Forenazi reconnaissance mission discovers the limitless potential of humans as manifest at Knossos. The Forenazis then pick a handful of Earthling tribes to vector the terminal disease of patriarchy. The Forenazis appear as gods; they proclaim the supremacy of their New Order and anoint the subject tribes as divinely chosen conquerers. Patriarchy expands accordingly: the pains inflicted by the patriarchal sword vanquish the pleasures and ecstasies of matriarchal community. Finally when the time seems ripe, the Forenazis engineer an apocalypse. Callisté – Thera – explodes with the force of at least two dozen H-bombs; the patriarchal legions overrun the ruins and murder the survivors.

The Minoan ethos is exterminated.

Humanity is irremediably set on the road to terminal species failure. 

The Forenazis strut and click their heels and salute one another; they have eliminated yet another species that might have someday overthrown their cosmic Reich.

(But of course this is only science fiction.)