Mayhem and the Reorganisation of Consciousness

Mayhem. It can be taken as another word for “chaotic transition”, or even Nietzsche’s “two centuries of nihilism”. Etymologically the word “mayhem” is related to the word “maim” — to cause injury or harm – but which has also come to mean disorder or chaos.

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Culture War and “Political Correctness”

Very often, I’ve found, what is often excused and justified as the “war on political correctness” is not what it paints itself to be, for what has also fallen under the rubric of “political correctness” includes civility, politeness, responsibility, and what we might call “common decency”.

In reaction to “political correctness”, its opponents paint themselves as, contrariwise, “plainspeaking” or “telling it like it is”, which are merely self-rationalisation and excuse-making for incivility, irresponsibility, or even the outright feral and barbaric. “Plain-speaking” or “telling it like it is” becomes a mere euphemism for the abandonment of any and all civility, obligation, self-discipline, and sense of responsibility, and therewith the jettisoning of all norms of civilised conduct in exchange for an orgy of sheer libertinage in speech and conduct.

Nihilism by another name, it is also probably a result of the post-modern “loss of self” and sense of identity, and in some sense is only the inverted mirror image of that which it pretends to despise as an intransigent “political correctness” as mandating an excessive degree of self-constraint and self-inhibition. The politically correct are over-civilised, while the “plain-spoken” are under-civilised.

 

The Trinity

To the mind, light. To the heart, warmth. To the will, strength. So says the Bulgarian Christian mystic Peter Deunov. In this formula, thinking, feeling, and willing are covered as aspects of the human form.

But with this formula also the bias that is fairly typical of the merely religious, and especially of Christian mysticism, is revealed, for what is missing is the sensuous, and therewith beauty. And so, to this trinity we might add a fourth: to the senses, beauty.

Only then is the human form complete, and perfected in truth, in love, in strength, and in beauty.

Monomania, in which one direction is pursued to the exclusion of the others, is deformation. The True, the Good, the Beautiful are not separate things. They are aspects or facets of one thing which is still hid to man’s clear perception and comprehension, but which is called by Gebser “diaphanon“.

“The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands and feet Proportion.” –( Blake, The Proverbs of Hell).