Monday, October 16, 2023
The Gestalt Conspiracy
Individual departments within government and like minded institutions in education, journalism, and pop culture needn’t consciously coordinate to direct themselves toward similar ends. The result of this conspiracy of like-mindedness can be compared to drawing three dots on a piece of paper and no longer seeing just three unrelated dots. A triangle does not manifest out of collaboration between dots. In a sense, an end product or goal emerges from the primacy of “the whole” over constituent pieces. A nation has distinct and somewhat predictable qualities in spite of the varied attributes and temperments of individual citizens or regional particulars.
Different unrelated segments within the leftist industrial complex needn’t coordinate their actions toward a particular end when that end itself is drawing them all into a particular direction. While this may defy the rules of cause and effect there is no rule saying that retro causality is not a legitimate means of appraising reality.
Almost everything in the universe exists in a state of defined independence and simultaneously exists as part of a larger overarching structure; atom, molecule, cell, organ, organism, herd….
In the human social sphere one finds the individual, the “couple,” the family, the community, and (at this time in history) the nation-state. It is the unique circumstance of humans that they can consciously choose to affiliate to varying degrees among these hierarchies of collaboration or largely reject all of them. While “no man is an island” he or she can certainly exert a high degree of independence from the collective if they choose to do so and they are not breaking some sacrosanct natural “rule” by doing so.
Gestalt is a branch of perceptual psychology that is best described in the well-know phase, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The greater configuration is something beyond and apart from the constituent pieces that produce it. In a sense, the gestalt appraisal can be appreciated by observing the patterns that have come to be called “fractals.” So it is that an individual can be something rather different in character than the collective larger construct while still following much of the archetypal design common to both. A person can be shy and quiet yet be part of an essentially extroverted or aggressive nation. This paradox ultimately plays into the many dilemmas that plague humanity (and not just humanity).
Today, one is often chastised or praised for noting the affinities one may have for a collective unit. Ironically, this paradox feeds into a basis for racism and varieties of manipulative victimhood. An individual can describe themselves as “oppressed” because they belong to a group that has genuinely been oppressed — even if they, themselves are successful and fortunate.
In the political sphere, seeing objective truth as favoring the larger collective constructs around us certainly leans one to collectivist philosophies (eg. communism, fascism). Allegiance to philosophies that honor the individual may be accused of overlooking genuine problems stemming from collective affiliations. It would however be accurate to say that collective entities tend to move toward greater abstraction. I think it was Ayn Rand who noted that “society is no one in particular and everyone but yourself.” It’s not to say that human group affiliations are invalid but they are, in a sense, less tangible. Noting the attributes of a “typical American” might offer some insightful perspective on their character and behavior but those general traits are ultimately a nebulous factor and may or may not accurately describe the actual life of a person or smaller community in their daily objective actions.
It would be quite accurate to note that the current zeitgeist seems to be favoring the coalescing of like-minded “conspirators” like The World Economic Forum, The United Nations, and a host of other group affiliations that favor biding the world’s inhabitants to centralized authority and the illusion that an imposed configuration is the only valid reality.
Three collaborating dots may form a simple triangle but “connecting the dots” in the collectivist movements of our time could prove fatal to the future of those who wish to maintain degrees of autonomy.
