Magic Circles and Spin Doctors
How necessary is the illusion of Freedom?
In order to gain more economic subjects? How far can the idea of Libertas extend before it becomes an insensitive rod? When does the absence of moral choice choke to Goose of the golden eggs?
With this sleight of hand the consumer becomes debtor soon enough, and the power to create more and more debt makes the monster grow out of control. The more the broom is splintered, the more it multiplies and gathers life of its own.
Where Echo prevails soon there will be Pan(ic.) The Sorcerer´s Apprentice, which inspired Disney has become a classic of this image of wanting to turn creative powers into everyday utilitarian tools.
What the apprentice doesn’t get is that such magic will spin out of control very quickly. It isn’t however, a mere apprentice of a craft attempting its use out of place, but an authentic Promethean feat which cannot go unpunished.
By breaking this rule of local meaning, the laissez-faire (free market model), equivalent to the whirl, becomes a fiat process:
The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own… Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book V, chapter 1.
The scaling up of the idea of Libertas has a flip side, for quickly the turning of a person into a citizen becomes an expedient way to a vote or a profit —a consumer driven by his debt could not be more vivid an image. The worst in this case, is that it enslaves, literally robing the possibility of an individual life experience.
The person, slowly but surely, comes to await the policy promulgation, a carrot or stick, as some sort of external whip, which as for the slave, drives her actions. Education becomes rather a form of indoctrination, and action, guided by narrow self-interest.
The same year that Waterhouse painted The Magic Circle (above), on the 28th of October President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty. This happened after on the 4th of September the US signed the end of the Indian Wars, with the surrender of Apache leader Geronimo to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon in Arizon. The battle of reason against the (natural) man —adapted to nature, had a clear winner, and the Red man was suppressed but never really integrated, and this conflict has built up now to huge proportions.
When a war breaks out, a psychic meeting of opposites which are supposed to function together in culture, or consciousness (embodied by the two consuls), falls apart and takes sides with the two opponents in battle. Then it never comes back together again properly, for when one wins, he takes over the role of the other. In this way an enantiodromia is always engendered, unless the triumphator looking behind him is really able to integrate the idea that he is also the conquered slave and the dead man. If he were really able to understand that, then the interaction of opposites could function properly once again. —Marie Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (p.271-2)
Liberty become over time everything except personal Freedom, essentially curtailing the very possibility of actions that could build up the wellness and trust from collective endeavor. A chosen individual path, becomes an increasingly remote possibility, for which the collective has no valid safe containers—not even the artist is safe and becomes a mere entertainer.
Magical Circles and What can you Restore with a Mythological Script? Europa — a deeper pattern to bring balance to Liberty
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The individual is enslaved, unintendedly perhaps, because all visage of moral freedom is gone replaced by neat rules to follow—until there is only an empty Echo.
And so the freed discover they are actually addicted (enslaved) in another way, making very hard indeed to stop the spin. Can the free now — albeit with no moral choice — `elect´ those who will feed their addiction better? Does this not render Libertas in a real contradiction?
Ah, how deluded are those who think one ritual twirl of a slave Creates a citizen! Here’s Dama, an idle footman, bleary-eyed With stale wine, who’d cheat you over a handful of horse-feed. His master spins him round, like a top, and in an instant, there We have Marcus Dama. Brilliant! ‘Will you refuse to lend cash With Marcus as guarantor?’ ‘Do you blanch at Marcus the juror?’ ‘Marcus said it, it’s a fact.’ ‘Marcus, add your name to this paper.’ That’s pure freedom: that’s what the cap of liberty grants us.—Persius, Satire V
Noticeably, the critics have no independent standpoint from where to see any other scenarios from those that the voters, business men or politicians themselves perceive. Yet every time when the long-wave is at its break-point, when deluge is unavoidable, the issue is simply one: the lack or moral freedom.
Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.
Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning—that is, the aims of nature—must pay for so doing with damage to his soul. —C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
I think this is what we truly mean when we say we need entrepreneurial discovery —the capacity to see the value possibilities from a high order complexity that cannot be reduced to simple solutions by rules. Few are ready to let go of the ties and rules to find new paths of their own, and there is no acceptable walk-about formula. Life long learning, entrepreneurial discovery, even innovation area all framed in the path-dependent ways.
When it seems indeed almost impossible to think a re-connection to a different principle of personal Freedom, different from that of Libertas, where to look? How to look? How to rediscover moral choice?
‘So who is free, other than those who may live life as they wish? I may live as I like, so am I not freer than Brutus?’ ‘Yours is Faulty logic’, cries the Stoic, his ear cleansed by biting wit, ‘I’d accept the statement without the may, and the as I like.’
‘Once I’m my own master, freed by the praetor’s wand, why Am I not permitted to act as my inclination takes me, except For whatever’s forbidden under Masurius Sabinus’ rubrics?’— Persius, Satire V
Could Freedom be rediscovered in the “savoir vivre” of Europe (Wenders,Giving Europe a Soul)? Could the sacrificing of entrepreneurs gain a proper ritual value? Could we find the guts to embrace the truer entrepreneurial discovery needed (complex character)? Perhaps a true ball of yarn (mitos) to exit the labyrinth lies at hand left by the sequestered Europa.
Naturally the option to scrape by and hope for a better future to come from some expectation, that the conjured powers may work their magic again somehow, without having to change anything substantial, without risk and moral choice, remains the future by default.
Overcoming scarcity
Co-evolution, entrepreneurial discovery, are the potential remedy to the dissection by Libertas. The overcoming of the scarcity mentality requires breaking through, dis-solving the restricted solution-space, where we are simply not capable of defining the right problem.
This is less than a trivial question for we are baffled by the Vital 6%. Related Story
It is quite unavoidable, considering the recurrence of the myth, that what was once lived out symbolically as a psychological reality, is quite conceivable a pattern for modern man. It may be ascribed to coincidence that we fear most the rising seas, but clearly this is not the first time.
We can believe what we like about the human factor´s influence on climate change, but the manifestations are altogether the same. And the demands of the time call for a new type of freedom, which breeds in the restraint of the outpouring of passion. In favor of listening to what is truer of each one, and every local group. And this is what we rediscover every day in working with teams and groups learning about the subtle forces at work in co-creative activity.
Myth organizes our understanding of reality at deeper levels than we recognize.
