The Power of Art
The artist is a shaman. The artist’s role, especially in the West, has always been to alter the state of consciousness of the viewer, and to force the big Other, the capital “O” Other, the collective superego, to face its own shadow—as well as to face the super-consciousness, the One that is beyond the Other, that it denies.
The collective superego denies that there is any power greater than itself. That is why powerful nations, identifying with the big Other, can appropriate the right to invade smaller countries or otherwise determine the destiny of our planet. But this hubris, whether played out on the scene of international politics or within a family system or even within a single individual mind, can never be successful.
The power of karma will eventually restore justice and balance to the world. One of the most potent instruments of that power is the artist. The artist reveals the higher Truth to an arrogant establishment that claims hegemony over the world. And it is that revelation that then moves the conscience of the world toward reconciliation of the great powers with the greatest Power of all. This archetypal battle of vision between the artist and the political establishment has created much of the tension that has formed the trajectory of history. In this context, even religions can be considered as works of art. Religions begin as visions of Truth, and become refuges within which the arts can flourish. But the religious establishments soon become battlegrounds themselves, being appropriated in time by the big Other, and the artist is soon cast out once again into exile.
The Ascendancy of Psychotic Knowledge
We have entered a period of epistemological chaos. The true condition of our world, indeed the very nature of our phenomenal reality, including agreement regarding the meaning of knowledge itself, is completely up for grabs. Not only are we witnessing rapid paradigm shifts and schisms within mainstream science, but also, and more dangerously, the politically motivated suppression of authentic discoveries and insights has led to epistemological blowback on every front. Every established authority has been de-legitimized. This has led to the rise of a new and unprecedented kind of discourse, which can be categorized as psychotic knowledge.
To call it psychotic is not to disparage it, but to recognize that such knowledge is produced by ripping apart the fabric of consensual reality. What pours through that tear in the discourse of conventional sanity may be brilliant with lucid transcendental insight and it may equally be speckled with nuggets of paranoid fantasy and archetypal imagery serving the narcissistic ego. It is psychotic from the perspective of the hegemonic paradigm that cannot permit multiple realities that elude the control and deny the legitimacy of the materialist construct. Coping with the accelerating explosion of psychotic knowledge, and the general contamination of the current information deluge with every sort of misinformation and disinformation, will become ever more challenging. It may, therefore, be useful to establish some guidelines that will enable us to maintain our sanity while remaining open to new horizons of possibility.
We can trace this problem back to the period immediately following the Second World War, when the government of the United States created a national security establishment and a general secrecy state. The geostrategic push to gain total hegemony over all global political actors had to remain covert. More and more information became classified as top secret, not only in areas of normal politics, but also in the sciences. Some of this rush to restrict the flow of information was a response to the intrusion of alien spacecraft into our skies. Since the government had no adequate response to this threat, the existence of such entities had to be denied and ridiculed. Many careers of honest observers of such phenomena were destroyed by that disinformation campaign.