21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

The holding onto paranoid and aggressive views whilst at the same time maintaining a ‘front’ of reasonableness and tolerance. All of this speaks of a society that is psychotic. Culture is in denial of desire. Genuine desire is thwarted and replaced by power-over and power-under dynamics and the substitute desires of materialism, wealth and status.

Perhaps there is good reason for people to seek escape in various ways from lives and routines that have become mind-numbingly predictable. But the various forms of ‘escape’ that are sought lack any clear direction. Creativity is frustrated. We have tamed the inner wildness of ourselves, because of our culture’s taming of the outer wildness of nature. So, our efforts at creativity are trivialised. Perhaps then, ‘obscene’ graffiti speaks to us about an eroticism that fails to find adequate expression in our culture. Wildness, walled in, will seek whatever means available to find its expression. Wildness is the domain of soul — the adventure of essence in the world. We need to claim this word soul back for ourselves and re-evaluate the place of soul in all aspects of our lives.

Western culture thinks that a subjective, soulful, enchanted view of life is somehow just fanciful and irrelevant. The body-centred, imaginative and creative aspects of our lives — in which we should be taking delight — are denied to us almost from birth by a culture that disparages such things as being superficial and self-indulgent.

What has been identified as the ascendant view of life is seen as the only possible view. This

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