How is humanity ever to be reconciled with the world? Human beings are homeless, and will always feel so. That is the forfeit of awareness. And if intelligence is discontent, then a state of reconciliation will always only be achieved as a temporary cessation in the general turmoil of human consciousness. It is never very long before misgivings set in, and the great churnings of maladaptation start up again – that which was strived for is found upon its achievement to be worthless, and some other purpose is then seized upon. If the maddening foreknowledge of absolute personal death is also taken into consideration, then the likelihood of an accomodation of the human spirit with the world becomes less and less certain. That which drives human beings, their instability, is inimitable to a state of grace.
However, before we conclude pessimistically, and all evidence points to such a conclusion, we can at least record that it is possible that ‘communism’ might serve as an interface between prodigal human intelligence and the great good and patient Earth. It might serve thus if communism is understood as a materialisation of what are called the ‘consolations of religion’ rather than, as is more usual, an unleashing of the rampant sex organs of capitalism’s forces of production. If communism might facilitate and channel the non-destructive expression of man’s destructive urges, if it might counsel man in his deepest anxieties and thereby distract him from doing something very stupid, then it is at least possible that the humans might learn to live in a state of homeostatic non-irreconcilability with the world.
To understand this more clearly, let us, dear reader, first consider the process of reconcilliation of the self with conditions at an individual level – how does the relational process called, ‘the consolations of religion’ work? We can see that when confessing before a man of god, the self transports perturbing and volatile materials of affect and experience from within and brings them out into a formal external relation. It is relieving that these thoughts and feelings are expressed, but it is also better that they are deposited into a controlled environment, rather than into the open-open. That is to say, there is a therapeutic unburdening without further injury incurred.
But speaking before the man of god is also a speaking for the first time – that is to say, it is making things up as there is no ‘within’ from which speech might be drawn. The self is creating that which did not exist before as speech. Confession is therefore an objectification of a speech content which the self is then able to consider, or read, as if through the eyes of another. I did not know what I was going to say until I said it, and then I saw that what I had said could not be otherwise. I did not know the meaning of what I said, until I spoke it before you. I understood what I said through your hearing my words. The tragedy in this wholesome act of creativity is that the man of god has heard it all before.
