IMAGINATION
When decomposing moral authority fertilizes the swell of totalitarian personality, liberal thinking people ask why and right thinking people reignite their claim to Belief. The idea that liberals are the ones who broke the system is true. Liberal educators like me, in order to expose injustices in language games teach methods to disrupt unthinking correlations between signs and things, thinking we would never succeed. But symbols do fall, and when they do they unbind the moral authority holding us together. Liberals say yay! because that moral authority was oppressive, too often a bad father. But now in a fight for legal process in a coliseum of corruption, the rule of law may not be able to take up residence in the hearts of a people defeated by the failures of our symbols.
If only we had a magic Word to revive and set things right.
In Freudian mythology, the father's magic word constrains the brothers from murder. The Big Other is the power of the Id held aloft by a shared idea, a symbol of authority that disciplines and gives meaning. The other is Big and is symbol because it has been fueled by the drive energy of all the brothers. The bottom of this problem, according to Freud, is the free flow of libido. As if eros were the same as Id, as if too much love in a family is the root of our problems. Jean Jacques Rousseau had an idea about drive energy holding us together but in a productive form as the Republic. The libido of the brothers drawn toward the idea of the Republic is the Republic. The Law is an idea that holds their hearts, corralling self-interest into the interest of the whole. The good news is that coming together feels great and submission to the members disallows domination of any one by any others. The Republic, like the holy spirit that joined the apostles in a democratic distribution of speech and power, is a prosthetic for self satisfaction.
Submission to feminine ecstasy is the center of pentecostal wisdom, with independent speech and common understanding available to all. Speech beyond speech and shouting out, believers catch hold.
Of the sisters, which nobody ever worried about in the whole history of political theology, there are powers of satisfaction other than the bemoaned failure of the phallus to reach its own signification. Contrary to an impossible and certain claim on a thing by its sign, a clitoris works underground and appears just at the tip. Of the unseen. What can be known are the facts of holiness.
Whatever sympathy can be obtained with the clitoris, for example, seems to be lodged in the mysterious insides of another and cannot be taken by force. The property of the interior, coveted by the brothers as their big government other is here all ready no need for deathly rivalries and bullshit name calling. Without mandate or pretending, jealousy or obedience, an underneath principle transmits a world arousing power. But that kind of feeling only happens with self-restraint from violation, if there is to be any kind of togetherness about it.
It's a habit that forms quite naturally in a conversation when by speaking you have imagined the inside of another who can hear you and live to tell about it. It is a humble thing and extraordinary. Reverberate and witness to its power. Submit to such a mystery with the refrain, imagine nation.
Democracy is a miracle of understanding by imagination, and by her power we speak in tongues.