Where I Reveal I'm an Addict, and What Plato's Republic Is Really About

I went to a week long group therapy retreat this summer because I'm CrAZy and I found out what my drug of choice is: Isolation. I'm an INFP according to the priests of Jungianism, the "I" meaning introvert. Yet I find being alone very painful. 

The negative effects of Isolation are pretty self-evident, but here's an article on the physiological effects of it on the brain:

For decades now, researchers have tracked the effects of loneliness and isolation on our physical health. One study with mice subjects found that isolation could increase cancerous tumor growth [source: University of Chicago Medical Center]. Another study found that isolation is a risk factor for disease on par with smoking and obesity [source: Goleman]. Loneliness often leads to stress, which is a risk factor for many conditions in its own right.

Flower un-empowered.

So introversion may be a legitimate proclivity, but I think there's a distinction between going home to "re-charge" and going home to "freak the fuck out," the latter of which is my favorite pass time. When feeling stressed, which I feel VERY OFTEN, I don't tend to seek the company of other human beings to talk about it, process the emotions, or even just distract myself for a while. This might be because, as my personality visualization to the right shows, my purple "Emotional Stability Petal" is muy pequeno.

The relationship between my other petals and the purple one is something like the relationship between:

and:

Its really the big ones that make all the great times happen. They kinda have "a good thing going." The little purple one does get some laughs when he freaks out about stuff, but a lot of the humor just comes from him being so small. If I could have my way, I'd write the purple midget off the show entirely.

I met the guy who played the little person on Seinfeld, Danny Woodburn, this summer. I was an assistant on a movie he was in. I was called on to set (I was trying to spend the day alone at home isolating ironically enough), and the head P.A. asked if I'd be Danny's stand in. I'm 5'4'', a good 16 inches taller than Mr. Woodburn, but I guess I slouch a lot. I'll blame my purple petal for that. We shook hands and said hello only briefly, he had kinda sparkly eyes!

So why do I do things that stress me out? Well, an important thing I learned at the retreat I went to is that stress is a choice. It is a way of not actually processing what is happening around you or in you. Any sort of stimulant has the same effect. Some people snort cocaine, some down diet pills, while I, being the ingenious mind that I am, figured out how to get high without spending money -- just being by myself. 

"Who asked you to be in charge, Michael?"

Stress is clinically defined as an inherently negative element of consciousness, while "Eu-stress" (Good-stress) is the term for any positive and motivating forces. Stress, as we know it today, is thought to be the effect of misfirings of the primitive "Flight or fight" mechanism of the brain. Sixpak Chopra goes into that a bit here. What leads to this misfiring?

Sixpak explains:

Not everyone is equally vulnerable to stress. Genetics play a role in how a person's body reacts. Your past experiences can affect your response, too. If you lived through a lot of stressful situations growing up, you may be more sensitive to stress as an adult.

I think hard facts like this are a healthy addition to my blog/life. There is something very fun and empowering and mysterious about talking about "God-consciousness" and all that, but without a grounding in physiology, and one's personal history, and really in reality, all those "mystical" pursuits will be unstable and even dangerous. But even Cousin Vivi seemed stumped by the question: "If we are actually always in connection with God and the ground of Being, why do we ever feel separated? Why do we buy into the illusion of otherness?"

Though Cousin Vivi viewed most of traditional Hinduism's exoteric tenants as helpful myths, but not facts in themselves, he did seem to cling to reincarnation as an explanation for why people feel, to different degrees, isolated. Some people are totally selfish, unenlightened, and seek their own ends -- usually to their misery in later life. Others seem completely connected and selfless and help move the world upwards with childlike purity. Why some and not others? The story is that the "more enlightened" have just been born more times, they've been "doin' it for a while."

This is hard pill to swallow, and it does seem like its suppressing some deeper truth. And since this truth is deeper, it must be truer, more empowering, and more beautiful than any myth. I know Plato would disagree, but he was into musical censorship, so fuck that guy.

One of the most profound spiritual realizations in the past millennium may be this: the sense of isolation is caused by trauma, in this lifetime.

In the 3rd book Tolle is revealed
to be a werewolf.

Eckhart Tolle talks about "Pain Bodies" in his book A New Earth. In addition to our physical bodies, Tolle talks about conceptual "pain bodies" that follows us around in our lives, reacting negatively to stimuli in unwarranted situations. Actually Tolle considers this less "conceptual" than I do, in his presentation they are quite literally spiritual bodies, perhaps existing on a different "frequency" than observable material bodies.

The pain in our "pain bodies" is unprocessed trauma, suppressed somewhere and squirming its way out when we least want it. Whether you believe it is stored in your memories, in your physical body (i.e. in chronic sore muscles), or in a spiritual "pain body," a small amount of self-reflection reveals that unprocessed trauma does not leave us.

Tolle alludes to the idea that pain from before you were born can affect you now. I know people who interpret a lot of their pain as coming from "past lives," it's not just weirdos like Laura Dern in "The Master."

"This sounds wacky, but I feel like in a future life
I'm going to be chased by Dinosaurs..."

I don't actually have any direct problem with this hypothesis, besides the fact that I think its untrue. The indirect problem, that seems more troubling to me, is that believing in "past life trauma" might just a way to not fully process trauma. The pain emerges from your unconscious as a vivid image of something happening to you during the french revolution and you're like "woah, that explains my aversion to hairy men!" I'm skeptical of this because it's precisely the way that dreams hide truths, through metaphor. But this is some meta level griping I'm making and I'll get back to the point.

When we don't process traumas after they happen, there are physiological effects in our brain.

There was a demonstration at the retreat I went to this summer that went something like this:

So you're having a trauma.

  What's going to happen is your Amygdala, or "Hind-Brain" way down in the center of your grey stuffs,  is going to fire dopamine to produce a rapid action. They call this the Flight or Fight response, or more expansively, the four F's: Fight, Flight, Fuck and Freeze. These are the four primitive survival behaviors that all sentient beings seem to be hardwired for. They even call the Amygdala the "reptilian brain" cuz' its so basic.

The Amygdala is hardwired to the "Mid-Brain" which is the emotional processing center of the brain.

These are the worst drawings ever.

  
The Mid-Brain and the Amygdala are extremely well connected. Dopamine fires up emotions which stir you towards certain desires and actions, all before you even have a chance to think. And I mean that quite literally, the Fight or Flight mechanism is meant to bypass any critical thinking skills for the sake of survival. These more advanced cognitive processes don't even exist in things like reptiles, so questions like "why should I hide from the bear?" or "what is the form of bear" don't occur to animals in the wild, and for good reason.

The problem is when this Amygdala based Dopamine reaction occurs for too long, then the Mid-Brain stops communicating with those advanced cognitive processes, which take place in the "Fore-Brain." This is the effect of "prolonged trauma," which can be anything from physical child abuse, to living in perpetual poverty, being raised with only one parent and missing the other's affection, all kinds of stuff. The important thing to know is it is not necessarily physical trauma. Emotional trauma has the same neurological effect as being in war, though to a different degree of intensity. But if you go years in an emotionally hostile environment, the neurological difference between that home and a tour in Baghdad is nil. 

Research has show that if car accident victims are asked to tell the story of what just happened, they are less likely to suffer post traumatic stress disorder from the event in the future. This helps the brain fully integrate itself and allows you to process things in real time, and not slowly and accidentally over the years. This real time processing is, unfortunately, not the norm for some of us when it comes to dealing with traumatic events.

 

I chill with this dude way too often.

  So, you didn't "talk it out," and a disconnect occurs between your Mid-Brain and your Fore-Brain (or Prefrontal Cortex). You get one of two outcomes:

1) Your higher level cognitive functioning is starved and your critical thinking becomes near impossible.

An episode of This American Life and Paul Tough's book "How Children Succeed" feature interviews with a psychologist who realized the implications of this. Underprivledged children score worse on critical thinking tests because their brains have been wired for survival and not for calculus, or philosophy. She says of the experience: "it was like that scene in The Matrix when Neo suddenly understands everything about the world." I think she really may be on to something there.  

If adolescent Pre-Frontal Cortexes didn't shut
down like this we'd never have The Wire!

 All that kinda makes me feel like shit because I'm not an underprivileged child, but I do have tremendous emotional fluctuations, and I'm very good at critical thinking! What gives? Well, there's another way your brain can react to prolonged trauma:

2) Excessive intellectualizing and neuroticism. 

Think about it. Ideally your brain connects all three parts and they work as a team. The physiological designation of the Hind, Mid, and Fore-Brain have been linked with concepts like the Id, Ego, and Superego. They're best when they're all pulling their weight. But what does a malfunctioning brain look like?

I find that these physical parts of the brain are easily connected to Plato's three designations of the parts of the soul: Spiritedness, Desire, and Reason. Neurotic intellectualism can be understood neurologically as the Fore-Brain being fully detached from the Mid and Hind-Brain. Anyone who's been a sensitive soul inside the world of academia know that underneath the placid facade of "put-togetherness" there's a tremendous amount of emotional and existential angst on every campus.

You can view society as basically divided along the lines of the question: "in what way have you learned to suppress trauma?"

So Plato noticed that there was a conflict going on inside everyone's soul. People have referred to him and Socrates as the first Psychiatrists. What was Socrates' solution?

 Here's Socrates' image from the "Phaedrus", reason whips the Desires (Mid-Brain) and the Emotions (Hind-Brain) into shape. What does this mean in practice? In the Republic Socrates has lengthy passages where he hashes out how the leaders of the perfect city, known as "The Guardians," will order their souls. Since Socrates believes that disordered minds are the result of past trauma, he has the guardians process the painful events of their past, which are keeping them from perfect wisdom. He describes several exercises where one guardian pretends to be your mom, another your creepy uncle, and you finally get to say all those things you never got to. There's another activity one where you simply let thoughts and feelings arise and leave, not trying to disturb them or label them, just letting them integrate into your consciousness and then pass away. In this way harmony develops between the three formally warring parts of the brain. And since the Republic is a model for the perfect soul and the perfect city, this is how universal peace is possible!

Just kidding! That wasn't how what Socrates did. I was describing a mix of Buddhism and modern Experiential Psycho-Therapy. The Republic is a description of a very aggressive Prefrontal Cortex doing everything it can to control the other parts of the brain. Socrates identifies memebers of society who correspond to different aspects of the mind and says that they need to be controlled, lied to, oppressed or even ejected from the city for the sake of its survival. Even music that stirs up the wrong part of the soul must be banned! How fun this guy must have been! DYK The Preacher from "Footlose" was a Philosopher King? The end result is the tyranny of raw "reason" over the other aspects of consciousness, to the extent that the most common and unifying feelings of compassion and love seem to be absent from "the True Philosopher."    

Perhaps this is the ideal of a Western Philosopher and maybe this is what "Ego-death" is in the East. Maybe its a necessary phase we all must go through. But it is not the ideal state of being for men like The Wizard Tolle, however. When you realize that this "enlightenment" is merely the mismanagement of trauma, it becomes a lot less appealing. And it always reveals itself to be unstable.

"I haven't dealt with the fact that
someone fingered my puppet."

Some thoughts to swallow: The first word of The Republic is "κατέβην" or "I went down." Socrates bans flute playing from the city. The poets in Plato's time had a euphemism for oral sex: "Playing the flute."  
 
But if the Platonic path is the path to peaceful, living on the island of the Blessed, and not a systematized process of denial, lets look at Plato's life and see how peaceful it was. Plato's Seventh Letter, the last thing he is known to have written, does not reveal a passionless, carefree soul. Heading towards his death, Plato is seen to be a crotchety, frequently kidnapped vagabond who wont rest for a moment until he can get someone in power to establish the perfect city (under his guidance). There's lines in it that could probably translated to quite literally say: "I'm too old for this shit!" And the worst part is he's trying to get everyone's attention, anyone who will listen, to how he has it all figured out if only they'd listen! "They, they, they." It's all about what's wrong with other people for the Pre-Frontal Cortex guys. Let's check in with Rev. G-Unit:

Rev. G-Unit repin' that Self-Evo Paradigm

Stress, in my neurotic Liberal Artsy way, is spending most of my time in my Pre-Frontal Cortex. Alone, I can let all my fears about the world and concerns about what everyone else is doing flow all over me. "If they'd stop being so fucked up, I'd be at peace!" I'm isolated from others, and isolated from my feelings by this strong psychic barrier -- but in the abject panic of "being alone in this world," just enough existential angst gets stirred up that I can get high, and ignore whatever is down there that actually needs to express itself.

How do I integrate, instead of dissociate? How do you just "Feel your feelings"? There's an Eva Brann book by the name: Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People Know, but I don't think more books are the answer for me.

Athens and Jerusalem: A Buddy Cop Flick

Athens or Jerusalem? Faith or Reason? "Great minds" have speculated about whether the two should be mixed, married, or divorced since the dawn of privledge.

Is reason and the philosophic life best kept as the "handmaid" of Theology, or should human reason stand upon nothing but its ennobling self -- these questions have kept white men awake at night for centuries. Though it seems like all the possible relationships have been exhausted, I think I came up with a new one.

Uncle Leo was all about this dichotomy. "Who's Uncle Leo?" non-loyal followers of my obsessions will ask. Here's Wikipedia's answer:

Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-American political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later immigrated to the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books. Originally trained in the Neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss later focused his research on the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and encouraged application of their ideas to contemporary political theory.

Here's my answer:

Magneto: (October 26th, ~1930-) A German-American mutant and political dissident, Magneto (born Max Eisenhardt) had the ability to generate and control magnetic fields. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later immigrated to the United States. Magneto created a lair known as "Asteroid M," an orbital base of operations where he taught several generations of mutants and created numerous weapons designed for world domination. Magneto was self-educated in his "neo-human" or "Mutant" abilities, but later became fully immersed in his powers under the tutelage of then friend and later archenemy Charles Xavier. Magneto interpreted the rise of mutant powers as implying the superiority of mutants over ordinary humans, and encouraged the application of mutant powers and oppression of ordinary humans in contemporary political action.

Ain't that the best? Strauss was a German-Jewish intellectual in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, and the atrocities of the Holocaust obviously weighed heavily on him. His essay On German Nihilism from 1941 depicts a man trying to make sense of the deeply irrational -- the rise of German Nationalist Socialism (his preferred term for the Nazi's in the essay) and the ensuing Holocaust. Taking a cue from Nietzsche and his idol Heidegger, Strauss professed that the problem was "Nihilism." It was the lack of common values, supposedly, that let Germany be taken over by the first asshole with a to-do list. Hitler was the Nihilist in the right place at the right time.

Last words before his suicide: "Whätever."

Nihilism, to be as technical as possible, is "not giving a shit." Life becomes meaningless on an individual level. Nihilism, when extrapolated, also causes society's fabric to get wrinkled because there is not a common set of values/group identity. This is dangerous, because if you're not careful a tyrant might come a long and turn that fabric into something awful, like an orange Zoot Suit or something. Strauss, with good reason, wanted to stop this from happening (again).

The official leisure suit of National Socialism
jk Charlie ;)
Below are two solutions to the "problem of Nihilism." 

I'm not sure who Dr. X represents in this analogy.
Maybe just Patrick Fucking Stewart.

LIBERALS

One side's got people like Kierkegaard and Joseph Campbell and Dr. Xavier on it. Let's call them "Liberals." From this perspective, the solution to Nihilism comes from facing the abyss of Nihilism head on, as an individual and not as part of a group that "has all the answers." Whether that means praying, meditating, going to therapy, sharpening your reasoning faculty unto the transcendence of reason itself, the idea is to build a strong, indestructible yet very fluid sense of "Self." In Indian Vedanta terms, the goal is to discover the formless "Atman," the source of all power, strength and creativity that exists deep within every individual.

NASA Photo of the "Abyss of Nihilism"

"Life has no purpose." That's the place where the true Liberal starts, the Liberal doesn't begin with any dogma or preconceptions. As the Buddha said: "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
We should obviously just pick
our role models by their looks

What existential tortures will occur when this possibility is authentically faced! Kierkegaard talked about the great pain that comes when the illusions of life are ripped from us, he called this "leveling." The result of leveling is "becoming a true self," (From Sickness Unto Death). As Joseph Campbell said, you must "follow your bliss," (the italics are mine). I call this the mystical path of "not being a pussy."

From this prospective, society should be designed to enable the full individualization of every member. It seems counter-intuitive, because it seems like these citizens would just be "thinking about themselves," but in practice it gives people a stable ground from which to engage in society in a healthy way. Without this stable ground, we project our own fears and anxieties onto the world and help hardly anyone. This type of society is called the "Open Society."

 

VALUES OF THE OPEN SOCIETY:

Tolerance, Individuality, Liberalism and a lack of Authoritarian Control, Separation of Church and State, Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom to Overthrow Unjust Leaders.

Henri Bergson first coined the phrase "The Open Society" in the early 20th Century. The idea was then famously developed by Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper's aim was clearly to wrote the manifesto for Liberalism. His attempt was stalled by one critical flaw: the book sucks. Strauss was not far from the truth, for once, when he said: 

 Popper is philosophically so uncultured, so fully a primitive ideological brawler, that he is not able even approximately to reproduce correctly the contents of one page of Plato. Reading is of no use to him; he is too lacking in knowledge to understand what the author says.

In the preface of Open Society Popper explains that he is a scientist, not a philosopher. Yeah, it shows. So maybe The Book on Liberalism has yet to be written. So what's the other end of the spectrum? Let's call them:

SHEEP

"Wait, Sheep? That's a loaded term!" And you know what, you're right! That's why I'm blogging and not going to Grad School. So an important thing to keep in mind here is that "Liberal" and its usual counterpart "Conservative" lose their normal meanings in contexts like this. Strauss defines Liberal in a way which is completely unrelated to modern "political liberalism." Liberals are, according to Strauss, "cultured." He uses the original use of "Liberal," in "Liberal education," to mean "free." Free in the sense of being masters, and not slaves. Liberated and not in bondage. Remember that harsh dichotomy!

Allan Bloom is another fugly old man I want to draw to draw some attention to.

"Will the real Leo Strauss please stand up?"

Bloom published a bestseller in 1987 called The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom is probably one of the most notable "Straussians," though he was not directly a student of the man. The book is a scathing assault on modern education that deigns to call itself "Liberal Education." We can consider this book as an attempt to answer the question of "Nihilism." I think it makes some great points. Here's a pull quote that I stole from the Wiki page on the book:

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

That'd be great! That's basically what I said "Liberals" aim for. And if this was the extent of the "Sheep" solution to Nihilism then there wouldn't even be a spectrum to talk about. The real difference is that the "Sheep" solution does not in practice demonstrate a belief that most people can "autonomously... seek that completion." The Sheep actually seem skeptical that anyone can attain that completion.

Check out this quote from Strauss' 1959 address at U Chicago entitled What is Liberal Education:

Plato, coy as fuck as always.

We have heard Plato's suggestion that education in the highest sense is philosophy. Philosophy is quest for wisdom or quest for knowledge regarding the most important, the highest, or the most comprehensive things; such knowledge, he suggested, is virtue and is happiness. But wisdom is inaccessible to man and hence virtue and happiness will always be imperfect. In spite of this, the philosopher, who, as such, is not simply wise, is declared to be the only true king; he is declared to possess all the excellences of which man's mind is capable, to the highest degree. From this we must draw the conclusion that we cannot be philosophers -- that we cannot acquire the highest form of education.

Those influenced by Strauss'
Political conclusions are often
identified as "Neo-cons," though
their actual exposure to his writing
is often dubious.

"Alright, so whaddafuck? Why can't I have the highest form of education? Why can't I be a philosopher? Wait... is the philosopher even real? And yo, Uncle Leo, how do you know that 'wisdom is inaccessible to man'? I thought you were teaching me something but now I feel like I know less than before. Heeey... is that the point?"

I don't think you'll get any satisfactory answers to any of those questions from anyone who is authentically labelled a "Straussian." And that may well be "the point." These types are usually into concepts like "aporia," which means "lack of a path." To know that you don't know in an authentic way, that's when "wisdom" if possible is possible. That sounds like a pretty scary thing to realize. It sounds like what I said "Liberals" do when they face the "Abyss of Nihilism" as an individual.  And it is the same thing, but The Sheep (by my definition) resist embracing the truth.

The Sheep make a distinction that The Liberals don't, and here's where the real division between them shows up. The Sheep don't think everyone is capable of realizing their ignorance in this profound Socratic way, and in acknowledging their ignorance The Sheep are in a sense the Elite. Here's some more Strauss from that same essay:

I'm not hurting you, the metal
I'm crushing your body with
is hurting you.

Democracy in a word is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy... Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.

So it's not clear if he's saying that "cultured" and "liberated" people are going to naturally arise to positions of power, or if we have a moral injunction to place them there by any means. The idea is that "Liberally Educated" people are more virtuous and therefore better able to decide what the values of society should be. If he is just saying that they will naturally rise to positions of power, then why is he saying anything at all? It'll just happen. 

This over simplifies his argument, but he seems to basically be saying that people with a classical liberal education are "entitled" to be in power because they are wise for knowing their ignorance.

Anyway, why are they "Sheep"? Well because they do not claim to be wise themselves, but they are in contact with those who are wise. Though they're Sheep, they have a Shepherd, and at least they're not wild ass goats. This is the move that all who claim authority must take, giving up their humanity to rule and oppress those they feel are "even less than human." From the same essay by Strauss:

We cannot be philosophers but we can love philosophy; we can try to philosophize. This philosophizing consists at any rate primarily and in a way chiefly in listening to the conversation between the great philosophers or, more generally and more cautiously, between the greatest minds, and therefore in studying the great books. 

Oh you pious dude, you. "I'm no philosopher, I'm just a silly book lover. BUT AT LEAST I READ BOOKS!" Is the subtext I read, "SO I AM ENTITLED TO RULE THE NON-BOOK READERS." Like, what crazy un-sane shit this is when you really think about it. But academia is rife with this! And of course it is, everyone has their biases. Strong people, pretty people, tall people, funny people, they all feel they have a God-given privileged to get what they want because they are different. It's just nuts that highly intelligent and discerning people buy into it.

I call them "Sheep" because they rob themselves from the ability to really know when they claim the right to rule. If Strauss claimed he did "know things" in this profound philosophic way, people could say: "Ok, what's 'The Good?' Why am I so unhappy? How do I make my daughter call me back?" But instead he gains influence as a pseudo-prophet precisely because he says he doesn't know, but he knows some guys who do. There's just enough empowerment and truth in it to get a bunch of disciples and to have your will be done by your own philosophic Sheep for a few generations, but ultimately that's all worth nothing because it comes from fear. I mean, you can't blame him. He was a German Jew in the '30s and '40s, wouldn't that skew your view on humanity a bit? Let's at least address that. But hey, another German Jew (who was actually killed at the hands of the Nazis) maintained her faith in humanity. Is her opinion not relevant because she hadnt't read The Nicomachian Ethics?

Swami Vivekananda: another
good looking awesome person.

Strauss claims in On German Nihilism that the open society is impossible, that moral life is impossible inside the illusion which is The Open Society, and that its ideal of progress are dangerous illusions. Well, there's some good points to that in my opinion, believing in external progress does seem like a waste of time. But that is precisely why The Liberal seeks internal progress, which is helped by serving others. This is contained in Swami Vivekananda's interpretation of Karma Yoga -- the benefit of helping others is that it frees you.

Read this polemical crazy-pantness from Strauss in that '41 essay:

Values of the "Closed Society"

Moral life, it is asserted, means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness - the flag and the oath to the flag-, are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented to, the Ernstfall, the serious moment, M-day, war. Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human: the sublime is unknown to the open society.

What crazy-pantsness! But it's helpful to take it seriously and to think about it. The Liberal will look at this Abyss in the face and see what the truth is for themselves. The Sheep will take a teacher's word on it because that teacher claims you aren't good enough to know the truth yourself.

Athens, Jerusalem, and...

Let me get back to that movie poster I started with. The dichotomy between faith and reason is  based on the presumption that a life of "faith" means a life where one submits to the authority of a particular revelation, which stipulates something like Christian humility, or you can believe that your own inner compass and rationality is enough to give you the right to rule others. This is the tension between "Athens and Jerusalem." Can I add another city that no one today would want to travel to into the mix? Calcutta, as a symbol of the the Upanishad's which have a radically different view on this dichotomy (and on dichotomies in general). I hold this city up as a metaphor of the true wisdom, in the highest and most philosophic sense, that The Liberals acknowledge and that The Sheep are suppressing in themselves.

Ramana Maharshi said:

Liberation is our very nature. We are that. The very fact that we wish for liberation shows that freedom from all bondage is our real nature. It is not to be freshly acquired. All that is necessary is to get rid of the false notion that we are bound. When we achieve that, there will be no desire or thought of any sort. So long as one desires liberation... one is in bondage.