Our Quest for Freedom: Meaning

[This is from my latest book Our Quest for Freedom and other essays]

Something that has disappointed me for many years now is the flatness of the language with which would-be radicals try to attract support to their cause.

One common type of article reads like a school essay, carefully shying away from anything that might sound like strongly-held opinion or emotion.

Another type is just stuffed full of jargon (whether woke or workerist) which is guaranteed to repel anyone who has not already been inducted into their particular agitcult.

I suppose this is because “radical” movements today are not really what they purport to be. The criminocracy has such enormous financial resources, in addition to its control of the state and its policing and intelligence forces, that it is quite capable of hijacking and then controlling any dissident movement that emerges.

Its representatives – full-time and trained for the task – will then be able to direct not just the content of the material published by the group in question, but also the tone in which it is expressed.

Flat, dull, lifeless prose, stripped bare of all poetry and dreaming, will only ever appeal to exactly the kind of flat, dull, lifeless individuals who are the perfect recruits for a movement whose aim is not to ignite revolt, but to bury it.

Our communication cannot remain on the surface of this society, trying to convince others on the basis of reality as defined by the system, using the system’s logic, the system’s language, the system’s syntax.

We need to go deeper, speaking to our fellow human beings through the invisible, underground, mysterious nervous system of our collective organism.

We need art! We need poetry! We need music! We need myth!

We can talk without fear of interruption or censorship here because the system is too dead to understand this intuitive and intangible living language of the World Soul.

This is why, incidentally, it cannot allow a work of art to speak for itself and always requires endless words, from the artist or by critics, to reduce to its limited understanding something that could only ever be said otherwise.

When I say “myth”, you are probably thinking of the ancient kind, which tell stories which apparently refer to persons and deeds belonging to the distant past.

But, in truth, these myths were simply formulations, in story form, of the archetypal needs and yearning of the human soul.

In different cultures, these naturally take on different superficial forms, but, as the likes of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade have shown, there are core themes that are universal.

Just as myths can take on different appearances depending on geographical or ethnic context, so can they take on different appearances depending on the era in which they emerge.

New myths are currently being born to carry us through the great battle for human freedom which lies ahead.

Fellow dissident thinkers like Crow Qu’appelle and W.D. James are telling us that we need these myths and they are absolutely right.

We need them in order to go beyond all the realising and explaining and proposing and to turn our yearning into doing.

Most of us are looking for a meaning in life and for many of us the contemporary “meaning” of material success, wealth or comfort just doesn’t do it.

In the same way as we see this degraded modern world through the eyes of the archetype we remember within, so do we regard modern pseudo-meaning.

Without necessarily being able to identify this, let alone express it, what we want is the meaning inherent in the human soul, the meaning that has been choked and held down by all those layers of psychological control.

This is a meaning that lives in the very essence of our potential as an authentic human being.

This same meaning was, long ago, expressed, shared and handed down to future generations in the form of myths.

We can often recognise our selves – our deep selves, our lost selves – in these stories when we hear them today.

They are not set in the physical world we know, but in a world that at the same time belongs to the past and to eternity.

This archetypal reality, this mythological reality, can act as the template on which we can create meaning for our own lives.

Of course, this sort of thinking is very much frowned on in today’s society, in which all sense and depth have been demolished and replaced with a postmodern shopping mall selling safe off-the-peg identities with which we can label and define ourselves in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

All the more reason, then, to embrace it!

Our shared myth is the story of a people suffocated. A vast, odious, stinking giant has enslaved us, destroyed our land, consumes our children with barely-concealed sadistic delight.

The people are scared of the giant. When the earth begins to tremble with the sound of his approach, they scuttle into their huts and huddle together in silence, afraid of attracting his malevolent attention.

This sorry state goes on for years, and all the time the giant becomes worse and worse, fatter and fatter, uglier and uglier, as he tightens his control and exploitation.

Then, one day, a strange thing happens. A small girl suddenly can take no more. While everyone is hiding from the giant, as usual, she suddenly pushes her way out from under her mother’s skirts and makes for the door of the hut.

“Wait! Come back!” call her parents, but it is too late.

She strides out into the village square, looks right up at the giant and, hands on hips, shouts as loud as she can: “Go away, giant! I hate you!”

What happens next? Does the giant crush her with his rainbow-coloured jackboots? Do other children, or young men and women, rush out to her defence, to join in this seemingly impossible act of defiance and resistance?

We don’t know, because the story has not yet been written.

But, in any case, the small girl is a hero. And she always will be.

She has stepped out of the realm of archetypes, the realm of potential, the realm of right versus wrong and good versus evil, and she has incarnated the values of that realm – made them physically real – in the world in which she lives.

With that act, she has become something. She has become herself. She has become what she was always meant to be. She has become both truly human and truly alive.

[Audio version]

Our Quest for Freedom and other essays can be downloaded for free here or purchased here.