'And for all this, nature is never spent'

A poorly focused ramble

You’re worried about power—that everything is reducible to this fundamental dynamic. Freud has made us suspicious; and this passing age of ideology has made us all the more so.

One of the choices that we get to make, day to day and moment to moment, is how we will view the world—how, to put it another way, we will interpret the impressions and sensations we receive. Of course, this is always something of a feedback loop: you start by interpreting things in a certain way—under some particular metric or rubric—and, so long as the viewpoint or ideology is sufficiently robust (and there are many which are: Marxism; Randian Objectivism; Freudian psychology; Foucaltian or Nietzschian power dialectics; the list could exhaust), because you go looking for a pattern which you already suspect exists (and because that pattern, indeed, is not altogether absent), you see it clearly… the more robust the pattern, the more clearly its adherents will see it everywhere. It is, of course, a matter of focus; focus is a matter of attention; and attention is a mode (however habitual it may have become) of intention.

The physical world, in the material sense of physics and chemistry, is wonderously complex and even retains some of its mysteries yet, for all our brute and brilliant hammering. The biological world’s complexity is of a higher order and Life’s secrets are better defended still. The human world, our social, spiritual, psychological, and linguistic (not to mention semiotic) atmosphere without which all the above would remain an entirely closed book, is complex to the point, nearly, of incomprehensibility. These complexities require of us a filtering of our attention in order that we can even begin to search for what is relevant and useful. So far, so good and so unsurprising. When we look for how, in a given instance or generality, self-interest (enlightened or base), or power, or class-struggle, or the conflict between id and superego might be manifesting, we will find what we seek. We will find it because all of that is always there, in greater or lesser degrees, and, in finding what we seek, we are reassured of the truth of our presupposition, our theory, our ideology.

Furthermore, the act of seeking and the belief itself manifest the pattern sought all the more. When you go looking for power dialectics in human interactions, you create them, in some small part, at least, even as you discover what was already there. More concretely, perhaps, if you go looking for signs of class struggle with your boss in some interaction, you will at least nudge (and perhaps shove) the interaction in that direction. When you keep a weather eye out for self-interest in every human interaction, you defend and reinforce your own self-interest and this cascades, naturally and all but inevitably, on the other party’s part. These lenses, these ideologies, are viruses wherever they take hold and totalize. They recreate the world in their own image. An ideology is always and everywhere idolatry: it worships the perspective, the lens, as Truth itself, forgetting that a lens is a tool for perceiving other, extant, things in greater clarity or detail.

This is not to say that all idologies ought to be rejected wholesale—some lenses have their uses, after all, and can aid us in a search for truth about the world or ourselves or even God. But the lenses are not Truth, the perspective we adopt is not God’s. Truth does not narrow, consume, and impoverish the world or the self, as ideés fixe do. Truth glorifies the world, glorifies existence, causes meaning to flourish. Ideology produces only the sort of meaning it predicts—and only does so by consuming all other sorts of meaning until the world is monocropped and grows barren and more barren, season by season. You accepted the ideology because it simplified the world and clarified meaning, made it easier to feed yourself and others, but the world grows hollow, so treated—the ideology consumes it even if, like some parasites, it passes some of its excrement to you as easy sustenance.

You will, eventually, come to an end where there is no more wold to understand, no more outside meaning for the parasite to consume and pass the waste along to you, nothing you can see through the lens you committed to save for a dead and blasted landscape—a wasteland in the creation of which you are complicit. In that wasteland, only death remains for you. The meaning you had sought and thought you were accumulating all your life being completely consumed, the parasite, at last, turns against its host.