"The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger.
The music of all the different media of life-memories, images, feeling-tones, poetic-musical connotations of phrasing-is kaleidoscopic and doesn't repeat itself or recur. -People who think they are trapped in a river of regularized and ever-repeating time are merely the victims of their own ordinarizing minds that have elaborated for them a prison-cell of everydayness. The fountains of time, history, life, inspiration, etc. are fresh every instant, if one knows how to grasp them with some finesse: every instant within natural, historical, and personal time is unique.
I am caught in a terrific bind of characterologically and rationally needing to think in the most comprehensive terms possible, forming a continuous system of argument with a gradient that runs from concrete to abstract, and unfortunately being caught also in a culture in which hardly anyone seems capable of applying himself to understand such a demanding form of argumentation.
A vital part of philosophizing is learning to trust one's own intuitivist intelligence, getting one's center of gravity back between one's feet. In our culture-so outer-directed, "objective" or extraverted-this is already heresy. This is self-mastering thinking, centered in what has been well-tested as certainties: autarkia or self-rule.
Indisputably we live in a shaped reality, an artificialism. Most people who grasp this are thinking only at a consumer-level, of the "things" they like and need and feel impelled to acquire. But our societal and political arrangements are just as much manipulations of game-pieces and rules as is any Atari or Sega product. The subliminal psychology that drives people to become addicted to games, not to be able to see over the edges of their labyrinths, is transferable to any field whatsoever.
Intellect is merely a narrow and highly specific kind of thing that we DO, but our immediacy relates us to what we naturally and essentially ARE, the actualities of our full-dimensional existence.
I have always been spurred on by my not finding expressed anywhere the kinds of perspectives that I thought these issues most perspicuously needed and deserved; but that is just another way of saying that Americans have overwhelmingly expunged from their public understanding the strongest and most clarifying resources out of ancient and traditional European cultures. By far we prefer our familiar and user-friendly parochialisms, and there is no percentage in trying to pry these pachydermal plates apart.
