In a way, these deacons of the cathedral, are correct - whatever ill they find, its roots can be found in investigating the supposed degeneration of “truth” in our society, if nothing else, then as a foremost symptom of all discussed. The story as they tell it goes like this - in sometime in the past, that edenic 1950s every American assuredly waves their hands towards, friendly Mister Rodgers type older men would sit behind a desk and deliver the facts as they are to the American people. Uniformly, the people who go home with a common story, one aligning with a clear-headed view of things as they really are. However, over the years, a minority of bad actors have conspired to rid the world of truth by creating a stream of confusing and conflicting information. Facebook, 4chan, Fox News, Tumblr, etc, all give birth to a number of competing sources that all dovetail into new refractions of what should be stable for them.
The fact that they’re unable to grasp is that what they are identifying is a symptom of a larger breakdown, and not one perpetrated by any of those discussed. Societies are organisms of capture, the corpus must be made of cellular entities - the people working within them. A society fails by its cells failing either in mutation or in breaking away. The truth decays as the head does. The brain comes finally, the most gilded and downstream images from the workings of power, and the utterances from the mouth, the after-the-fact of almost every operation undertaken by the body. The Truth decays since its inception in the golden era of the empire, as the empire itself fails.
Cell breakaway, they identify too late. Necrosis and cancers begin far before their symptoms show and when mutations and localized death begin to occur, separatism and rebellion in the social context, they have no recourse but mute horror. Certain desperate attempts are made to return it back to its original form, to no avail. The cycle of life and death, so eloquently described in the Dynastic Cycle, only goes one direction - clockwise. Death of an empire cannot occur by anything except killing and rebuilding it. Truth collapses like leaves falling from trees in Autumn, and only a long, snowy season of death, can precede the new bloom of springtime.
There is no tendency more identifiable with a late and decaying empire than this first dawning of the fading sun, when those born in the golden light of prosperity look down upon darkness with scorn and unbelief. It’s often said that boomers do not believe they can die and nothing speaks more accurately to the heart of their soul than this. Boomers, born at the imperial pinnacle, were born into a time and place where they could believe that death was abrogated completely. The shock of “American Pie” as in Don McClean song, a long ranting breaking-open of the world after the Day The Music Died shows this. Between this event and the Kennedy assassination, the Boomer experience was one of shock, born at the pinnacle, riding unstable waves, desperately looking for an exit as the Camelot president’s head was shattered open and the clean-spoken ditties of radio music went down in a rural cornfield.
The boomer years carries with it the fascination it does, even for younger generations, because in it is contained all the pathologies of what would ensue. The boomers had a brief glimpse of what was to come, when icons of the Cathedral were shattered before their eyes and the window could be cracked to see the yawning horror beyond. Their movement had a duality to it, one that Pynchon writes “dovetails sharp as knives” between the knowledge of death and the expectation of life. They lived in total prosperity and their movement was based around hedonism, drugs such as LSD, marijuana, and free sex embracing open pleasure like a balkan cartoon of an Ottoman nobleman. And yet, their concerns always pointed towards what they experienced when they saw the veil open up, like Prince Siddhartha’s Four Passing Sights, when they saw not only the coming end of a society in cancer and necrosis, but its naked anatomy, in the operations of power. They enjoyed what was given to them, the dream of wealth that was still in full swing during that decade, but without the barbiturate dreaminess of the 1950s, their eyes opened for a brief second to the reality of life beyond the enclosed comforts of an empire’s apex.
The veil I speak of is the shattering of truth, so feared by journalists. The see the end with pathological fear that must be sublimated into various imaginary enemies, SJWs or the alt-right, like Michael S. Judge’s theory on the Courier’s Tragedy being Oedipa’s sublimated interpretation of the nakedness of power revealed in the Kennedy assassination. When the corpus decays, in cancer and necrosis, so too does its coherence and thus the coherence of the image it projects to the world. The veil it creates, its superstructure, falls to pieces before the eyes of the viewer, to show the naked wilderness beyond. This brutal comedown, the slow falling of autumn leaves as frost begins to creep in on the edges of the once womb-like humidity of august garden parties, is the pathological fear that the most downstream parasites of our society are gripped with. Without knowing it, they, like few others, capture the sense of an empire decaying, even if in delusion and farce.
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