Imagine a world where things don’t remind us of other things. Where we don’t greet each other as memories and so memories are not things and neither are the people in front of us. Relationships in the moment, not prefaced with memory. A mind that does not remind.
Psychologists tell us that psychopaths see people as objects, yet we all see each other as objects. The difference lies in our ability to curb that self-involved numbness with empathy. This is no way to live and yet here we are. Living it. Yup, living the dream. Living in reminders and mimicry. This is the world we create when we don’t understand ourselves.
Part of that understanding is how life is fractal—the same several expressions combining and playing out in novel mutations, metaphors within metaphors. That which we don’t understand we act out to talk to ourselves about what needs to change for us to be healthy. We are living parables, living plays, expressing meanings that all revolve around exposing our partialness. Rarely do we understand our partialness, having made peace with it by calling it human nature. Our understanding stops at the follies of our alleged nature, which play out over and over and over again on a loop precisely because we do not understand our partialness.
Imagine a nation where the people stopped going to movies and plays, stopped reading stories, that exposed the seedy underbelly of their choices to them and revealed how to behave morally. Imagine they stopped choicelessly because they woke up one day and realized that they were telling themselves the same things for thousands of years over and over and nothing in them had fundamentally changed. Imagine a nation of people who understood themselves to be addicted to ideals as a way to cope with their partialness, which they had for too long accepted unquestioningly. They assumed the deepest questions were about navigating the human drama, not whether that drama was the whole of the story or a symptom of disease.
Imagine one nation waking up from its definitions. Imagine what communication sounds like when we are not talking to ourselves about ourselves.
Imagine a nation no longer living in its imagination.