Can Your Soul Rest in the Age of Spin?
‘What is Truth?” asked Pilate as he stood right at the edge of corruption.
Isn’t that where we all stand now? Having to decide how good we want to be, how courageous, how much risk we are prepared to take, how much comfort we can afford to give up? The air spins with questions, smells like fear. Then the spin itself, telling us up is down as we’re assaulted from all sides, and you see with alarm, it’s the people you never would expect.
And then you remember this isn’t about intelligence but consciousness and that light takes lifetimes to illuminate the sullied soul; that evil is banal; that ordinary men and women betray their neighbours as routine under the anvil weight of oppression; that it is so much easier to sell your soul.
Before this, during 25 years’ working in psychotherapy, seeing the mass-man’s refusal to confront his conditioning, fear and shame lying at its base, an inability to be vulnerable, to face the helplessness we all felt as children, to honour thy father and mother at all costs, even when it is killing you to remain loyal to the lies; even when your job, the express reason you are here, is to mutate the family tree; to prune, to grow and to heal.
Then you understand we are wired to belong, to herd together, to stay on the side of the majority; yes, to survive. We are not yet wired for Truth and perhaps you have to be deeply betrayed to be hungry for it, to know that it is the most important thing (even if you sometimes find yourself lying about the small stuff — we all do) and I realize I am glad. The fear, shame and conditioning that bound my family was the crucible of my freedom — I was willing to burn in it, to thirst for what was not, to remain the outsider. It’s sacred ground for any artist. Not to kowtow for acceptance from the collective.
I saw the pursuit of money, success, bury Truth under its rubble, each agglomeration killing it a little further, until it remained like dust on the skirting board, ever present, hardly noticed. Nobility in ruins. In the end, it was the love that dared not speak its name.
I observe Boris Johnson and all the other boarding school survivors who cannot feel yet tell us how to live; and who, because they cannot feel (the system killed the child in them — the repository of joy) can inflict any atrocity. Their denial perpetuates revenge, the acting out of rage. It is no coincidence the generation above them are the first to be culled.
Truth is inconvenient, and with all the media spin, its search exhausting. Vested interests will tell us to put up and shut up, those who work in bureaucracies unwittingly caught in a tranche of consciousness, or should I say, unconsciousness — often good people — in systems grounded in assumptions about life, faulty or just plain wrong. Cognitive dissonance, the unwillingness to accept an alternative view even when evidence is overwhelming, finishes the job.
But if we can’t look to words for Truth, we can look for symbols. The overarching image I remember as a kid when I had to lie about my parentage at school to avoid upsetting my new family was being blindfolded and spun around. It was my preparation for the current times. I know those who are supposed to love us, or at least care for us, can destroy to support their own pathology, to hang on to their assets.
It is precisely what is happening now with censorship, ridiculous laws, media brainwashing and the eventual curtailing of all human freedoms. That is the end goal.
We need to hold to something finer. It’s called Truth, we just have to find it, and when we find it, keep it close, never deny it for the sake of expediency. Too much rests upon it now.
Choose a side — let your soul be your judge.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
