Danger 1:
Ever since mystical knowledge has become widely accessible in popular culture (when exactly did this begin I have no clue of but I presume it must be around 18th-20th century) thanks to capitalism, it has fled the underground drawing-rooms of mesmerism, washed itself clean of the horror fiction it engendered and has found itself positioned right next to the cashier at a bookstore near you in nice, bite-size packages. With so much material at hand, it is easy to fall into syncretism, which is not a problem for the scriptor of this text as long as the study aims at something. However, things, I think, get out of hand once the paradoxes, parables and a plethora of lovely phrases that these traditions have engendered become tapas (meze/bitings) for whatever the service the subject enunciating requires. Kind of like an inverted intentional fallacy, or reader-response theory gone haywire… This, merged with postmodern cultural relativism (which is going out of fashion in academia finally, but will stick to the streets for now it seems) and a warped idea of Democracy and Reason, produce a terrifyingly idiotic genie that possesses human agents and urges them to become tools to the cop-out that is “this is my opinion, you have to respect it…” Once this is uttered, the expectation is that all interpretation must stop, all paths to t/Truth are blurred and each one is assigned their own little game to play. Not only that, the game you play is different than mine, since we are both unique (You got to admit that this idea of the unique caresses many narcissistic soft spots) therefore you go your own way and I go mine… You got to do what you got to do, in NYC parlance (when I share something with you, I’m by default asking for you to tell me what I should do? The audacity…)
Fair enough, but can you possibly imagine a world where everyone ceases to interrogate the others' opinion? It would be as boring as golf if you ask me. What else do we have to talk about? Consider the minute the other ceases to be a zone of psychic give-and-take, we’re left with nothing but ourselves, this supposedly unique being which stops being unique if there is nobody else to measure itself up against - can you actually imagine white without black?
But I digress…
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