I think in many ways our institutions are under assault, … externally, and that’s the big news here, is Russian interference in our election system. And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.
James Clapper (National Intelligence Director)
Clapper’s dire warning in 2017 has only intensified this year, with similar calls for action ringing throughout the world to save the institutions of democracy.
When Clapper spoke if an internal threat, he meant the Trump threat, i.e. he was using the word “internal” positively i.e. as referring to a positive “inner”, like the inside of a cup or a room or the United States. But if we can just shift our perspective a little, to the soul perspective, we can hear his warning as referring to a soul event; that is, the attack on institutions as an “inner” event that has already-always happened. The institutions of the mind, ie our representations, are under “internal” assault and that reality is the formal cause of the collapse of outer institutions. As Arthur Danto puts it, we (and representational artists) view the world through our representations, and not the representations themselves. So we normally do not recognise the way we are representing the world, we just perceive the world. If our representations undergo an epochal transformation, we can normally only begin to become aware of it through perceiving a collapse in the old order, outwardly.
In 2015, I wrote a book that explores this soul phenomenon, i.e. the collapse of the institutional mind and descent into chaos. Here are some excerpts from the Introduction:
This story is as dark as the time we seem to be immersed in today, yet the light that this darkness brings, is the truth of our times, its spiritus rector. At present this “dark spirit” is working its will in the world through many institutions, wreaking terrible damage on the lives of human beings….
In my book I am concerned with thinking, or living language and I want to demonstrate what I mean by starting with fossilised or dead language, the kind of language that we use daily to successfully communicate established meanings. Such language may even be called institutionalized language, as in “established for some extrinsic purpose,” like education, public service, government, etc. The focus of pragmatic language is usually not on the language itself but on its external references in the empirical world. What happens if I shift my focus for a moment from the obvious empirical references of the word “institution” to the word itself? One way to do that is appealing to the dictionary and its institutionalised meanings.
I noticed immediately that “institution” is paired with “establishment” quite frequently and both words have this interesting morpheme, “sta”, which suggests a root meaning, and indeed there is one—stā. Both words spring from this etymological root, as do many others. There is an image held in this root—to stand, an ancient example of which is a stallion, or studhorse standing.
So often words in their modern, dried, desiccated, abstract usage spring from a deep “past” that is alive, vital, concrete, and of the sensual world i.e. a sensuality that holds both imagination and the senses in union. As I looked more deeply into this root-image I was struck by the plethora of word meanings that spring from it. They occupy a full column of my very large AHD! But my imagination was particularly drawn to a few words that stood out for me: “understand”, “thread” (from “stāmen”), “epistemology”, and most startlingly, “ecstasy”. Who would have thought that ecstasy and institutions have anything to do with each other? These words appear frequently. They belong together as aspects of a deeper meaning that wants to “presence” itself through my writing: the meaning of a stallion standing—a very alive, generative image indeed, and perhaps already we can already begin to see how ecstasy and institutions belong together in the image of the horse, if we remember the winged horse Pegasus who struck a rock with his hoof and released the waters of poetic inspiration.
To return to my claim that at present a “dark spirit” is working its will in the world through many institutions, wreaking terrible damage on the lives of human beings, I am not referring primarily to external references in the empirical world. There is no ghost haunting the halls of our various institutions. I am speaking of language, or the being of language. An inceptive dream I had in 1985 (see book, p. 14) guided me ineluctably towards an encounter with a darkness within language itself, i.e. our modern language. I did not want to think what is unthinkable but I did, over thirty years, at no small cost.
As I descend into this darkness and bring you, my reader along, and if I remain faithful to the movement of language itself, then it seems that, when the darkness reaches its nadir, we will both encounter the generative downward strike, lightning-like, of a horse’s hoof, from which a flood of new language will emerge—poesis, the unknown future!
This, then, is a story of the journey towards discovery—the discovery of what it takes today to remain what I am and always have been, one ordinary human being, at a time when a non-human being, or alien way of being, has succeeded in seizing the human spirit and, so far, is appropriating it to its own ghastly ends.
