For the few who create the game is cut unevenly between the function of reduction and that of enrichment. A fierce reductionism comes upon any generation grappling with its sense of powerlessness. If it remains in that state it is finished and simply becomes a poor example for future generations. To the few who create the need is to escape, through all means necessary, the power of reductionism whether the reduction comes in the form of money, politics, or sex.

Growth and development are utterly necessary to the artistic way. Without it the artist will be controlled by the reducing element in the culture and never flourish. Creative types have to fight like living dogs for this growth and development.

The goal is simple: produce enrichment and not reduction. Reduction is for the manipulators and manipulatees. It's for the play of predictable patterns that create hell on earth. Reduction is a succubus.

The creative type must find the path to enrichment without which his talents are useless. Get there by the speed of light; get there through the Eternal Now but get there as soon as you can.

One reason the academic and critical communities are so crapulous and so marginalized is that they are reducing what has already been reduced by the creative type! This outrage has made the academic and critical communities laughingstocks and highly perishable in a history that always itches to move forward and bury 'an era.'

So, why are the kids killing themselves or those around them?

We lay the blame at the feet of the parents and culture whose lives are a reflection of this general reductionism. The parents have reduced life to sex, money, and the will to power. This is the legacy being left to the kids who, then, kill over sex, money, and power. And how could it be any other way when the political class has been shaped by the reductionists of the left and reductionists of the right? Every issue, every debate, every candidate, every filthy commentary in the last 30 years has been conditioned by the reductionists on the extremes. There has been utterly no enrichment. Kids need enrichment or their brains die, then the soul dies and when the soul dies what's left is capable of killing anything in sight. When the people sweep the reductionists of the left and right from the stage of history and introduce new types of enrichment the society will improve. Not a day sooner.

Let the reductionists die to the good, green earth; let them perish in their own ash.

The desire is always expressed for the enrichment but then, at the crucial moment, no! The gods or the stupid wipe it away. The free societies, esp. America, have struggled over one fact. They came into being through stupendous revolutions. For brief moments they were freed from the constraints of toiling and dreaming under supervision. As the various revolutions freed the mass of people from constraints they found themselves between two temptations. One temptation was to emulate those they had overthrown and the other temptation was to re-create themselves in some more profound image that separated them from the past.

These twin temptations have torn at the mass of men with the result of pain and guilt. The guilt of destroying the past and the guilt of taking on the godlike re-creation of themselves. And perhaps the dream at the beginning was the energetic re-creation of oneself but then it degenerated into creating oneself through a collective image controlled by new supervisors; the marketers, for instance. Stupefied man observes the confusion in his own mind and heart, measures that confusion against the confusion outside himself and calls that change. But the truly creative change in an individual occurs over a long period of time.

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David Eide
January 24, 2014