Plato, His Republic, Left-Brained Consciousness & the Modern World

10:02 AM Thursday July 28, 2016

Pondering the basis of elitism...

Here I am…looking at Plato's Republic…a summary at Wikipedia…thought flashes through me:

Real problem is the gradual taking over of the human psyche by the left-brain, the speech center, the attempt to further conscious control…

Emergence of what we call consciousness. This consciousness is dominated by the language center and is different than the consciousness created by the pictogram cultures that use hieroglyphics to send messages. Pictogram cultures, eg Chinese, use images rather than a phonetic-based writing system. That's why we read left-to-right, activating the Broca speech center in the left-brain, while they can go in either direction.  Pictograms activate the right-brain....and more on that later.

So pre-Socratic culture is the culture of people who can still find the center of the psyche outside of their ego. By the time Socrates comes along, the elite, who need to be in control and understand what they do, have become obsessed with delineating the meaning of various concepts such as justice, which has a basis in what is strongly felt, in our experience. So, our experience is at the basis of the concept...not pure ideation...and this is not to say that our experience is never distorted or merely subjective.

Socrates and Plato abandon the tragedies...all evil comes from an imperfection in understanding or conduct that is our human "error" ...a lack of good ("privatio boni")...not inherent in the system...because that would make God responsible for evil.

By the way, reading Plato, you might think that basically every dinner party in ancient Greece with the elite was a kind of ancient "Charlie Rose Show"....

What the people who are advocates of a certain type of consciousness want are definitions so that they can argue their case concerning their activities and programs in relationship to values. It represents the emergence of a lawyer-like attitude that we begin to be find almost everywhere in the West after the Renaissance and find nearly everywhere in the world today.

In a sense it is the left-brain "mind" taking over for the "gods"...those impulses from within that were considered to come from "on high"...through (in Latin), the "Rex" (king), whose name is the source of the word "reason"...the "rays" of light...or from a very feminine Pythia or female seer who told us what the "Mother" wanted...

This elevation of consciousness (in the word-driven version of it) is part of the mind-body split. It might explain why Apollo killed the lover of his sister.

Apollo killed the lover of his sister because the lover represented a threat to his ownership of the knowledge. Apollo protected the Pythia, the woman who was the oracle at Delphi in Greece.

By the way, the oracle was usually an uneducated shepherd girl...ah..yes..very little left-brain there to interfere with the process of going back into the unconscious through the right-brain, the real "interpretation expert", the "Eve"....more on that later. (Mostly a note for myself right now.)

Socrates and people like Socrates shift to the anti-tragic worldview because, as they become conscious, they begin to judge God by the same concept processes that they use to judge themselves. And with that, begins a long process of making God not responsible for the evil of the world. That continued for literally 1300 years until 17th-century philosophy and especially 19th-century philosophy question the existence of God or question the way he operates.

What's done to people through process of shaming is that a kind of Berlin wall is set up between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. I like to compare it to the scene in the film "The Emerald Forest" where the Brazilian native people come to the edge of the rainforest and see construction of the dam going on. They call it "the edge of the world".

I say that the walling off of consciousness which began with the Socratic philosophers started to come to an end, a real end, in the 19th century with Nietzsche and Jung who began to distinguish that the unconscious is actually a vital and intelligent force that we are in some sense loathe to acknowledge.

Freud essentially deemed the unconscious mind as the unruly element of the psyche, the "Id". He never saw the conscious mind as the source of our capacity to be so unruly and neurotic, as it were.

So between the trauma and the fact that we are left only with this mapbook called the conscious mind, our culture  had to head in a certain direction which has led us to all of our problems that we have today.

Since the unconscious mind and all of its relationship to the collective unconscious is at once denied and cut off, then it follows that the leadership class is the only one with the capacity to understand what needs to be done. I am reminded of the scene in "Remains of the Day" in which the head of the estate puts his head servant certain through hell, embarrassing him concerning his capacity to participate in democracy, as if he had no mind.

Kilroy wasn't there in that scene, but Plato surely was....

Just had the flash that the head of the estate was essentially a fascist as well, albeit a kinder gentler one, and that's why he couldn't understand what he was looking at what he was looking at the Nazis.

But, the American (Christopher Reeve) did with his more pragmatic intelligence...

If the servants have incomplete minds, then they will interpret their instructions incorrectly and that can't be good. So, they must remain tabula rasa to the point of a virtual complete self-extinguishment. It's been the modus operandi of various great institutions from the Catholic Church to the Communist Party.

To be continued....