Diseases of Conscience

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

I know Freud's sound reasons that led him to his conclusions.
I know also how our belief systems are entangled in
cultural assumptions and biases to which we are blind.
I can't swallow the trinity of Id/Ego/Superego.
I come down closer to Jung, but I am no Jungian.
Symbolic iconography and eidetic archetypes are the nonverbal language
of the deeply dreaming mind.
Ego consciousness, which is
perdurably fused to spoken language, is an
evolutionary recent invention, an afterthought,
an abstracting overlay on the phylogenetic mammalian mind,
that enormous, subconscious, symbolic, analog
data processing machine.
Words like subconscious and unconscious imply a
misleading primacy for conscious awareness such as
Freud's culture demanded. Implicit assumptions are sometimes
explicitly, exquisitely misguided.

Our minds,
our souls,
are conveyed about in clumsy bodies: gene machines
preoccupied with fight-or-flight and
making more gene machines. Our bodies, our
physical presentations to the world, may or may not correspond
to our interior beliefs and dreams, the true realm of I.
Books and their covers, you know. . . .Any person's world is only
an interior creation, a production, or reproduction, delimited
by the borders of his flesh: Existenz. We have no
objective knowledge of the Dasein, that theoretical world
external to the flesh. Of that quantum, soupy realm we have only
such claims of reality that our sensory organs
modulate into the Morse code of neurologic impulses,
interpreted by lonely and isolated, conjecturing brains, dripping
down into the musty basements of subconsciousness, of which
only the barest minimum, infinitesimal lamina can be accessed
(and further corrupted) by
transitory conscious focus.

Now, we're all familiar with
certain psychic disease states. We all know
certain people who are not exactly
right in the head.
But in this hierarchical ecosphere we inhabit,
there are also psychiatric syndromes acting on
other levels, or tiers, of organization. Sometimes
individual human beings are single cells
in a larger, coordinated body. There are certain
diseases of conscience that infect society-as-unit.
These syndromes, striking a society, go on to poison
its individual cells one by one, resulting in a pervasive
and irresistible process of dissemination that eventually
compromises one's personal integrity.
I think of how my own nation in recent decades
has rushed madly away from a rural lifestyle
to an urban and corporate modus vivendi.
In the agricultural-based societies of our grandparents
and their parents and grandparents, a man's handshake
was his bond, and a request to put an agreement in writing
was an insult to a man's honor. Honor itself possessed
universally-recognized value. If you have honor, you
always concern yourself with doing the right thing. That means you
have to know what the right thing is. Such knowledge requires
knowing very clearly what your personal values are.

But personal survival in our present
industrial-corporate-urban society requires that we
constantly shift among mutually incompatible value systems. Successfully
negotiating these exclusive and antipathetical dynamos
churning in the corporate milieu is vital to one's economic stability, not to mention
simply avoiding being fired from one job after another.
Mere survival now requires that we
actively refrain from closely examining our
personal values. Adhering to
personal values is an anti-survival strategy in this society.
This is the disease of conscience which has sickened us collectively,
and as individuals: we are actively discouraged from developing,
or fortifying, any personal values.

Now, do you know that
we desire what we value?