“The emotion of Love is an act of
personal identification with an
external Other, when the awareness of that person is
so overwhelming that any
illusion of separation between
The Two collapses.
There is a reason why
the biblical term for
physical Love was
‘To Know’ someone.
As such it is distinctly different from the isolating Individualism so dominant in the rest of the century. What it is not, however, is
an easily extendable organisational principle
that can readily be applied
to Society as a whole.
Christianity had done its best
to promote Love during the
previous two centuries.
The Church ordered
its followers to Love,
through commandments
such as ‘Love Thy Neighbour’,
as if this was reasonable
or possible.
But ordering people to Love
was about as realistic
as ordering people
not to Love.
Love just doesn’t work that way,
and it doesn’t inspire confidence
in The Church that it
seemed to think it did.
It is noticeable that the more individualistic strains of American Christianity, which bucked the global trend of declining congregations, put less emphasis on that faith’s original teachings about Love and Social Justice.
The love culture of the hippies was brought low by the egofuelling cocaine culture of the 1970s and 80s. Attempts at describing a non-individualistic perspective were dismissed for being drug-induced, and therefore false. The hippies’ stumbling attempts to describe their new awareness had been too vague and insubstantial to survive these attacks and they were written off as embarrassing failures by the punks. Yet slowly, over the decades that followed, many of their ideas seeped into the cultural mainstream.
One way to understand the Twentieth Century’s embrace of Individualism is to raise a child
and wait until he or she
becomes a teenager.
A younger child accepts their place in The Family hierarchy, but as soon as they become a teenager their attention shrinks from the wider group and focuses on themselves. Every incident or conversation becomes filtered through the ever-present analysis of ‘What about Me?’ Even the most loving
and caring child will exhibit thoughtlessness and self-obsession. The concerns of others become minor factors in their thinking,
and attempts to highlight this
are dismissed by the
catch-all argument,
‘It’s not fair.’
There is a neurological basis for this
change. Neuroscientists report that adolescents are more self-aware and self-reflective than
prepubescent children.
Aleister Crowley may have been on to something when he declared that The Patriarchal Age was ending and that The ‘Third Æon’
we were entering would
be The Age of
The Crowned and
Conquering Child.”
