“Where we get into trouble is with the absolute.”
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The “absolute”: one way or another it confronts us with infinity. That is, with a decision that’s irrevocable: forever. Say that we can say that the absolute is infinity’s illusion. The Truth. (If nothing is irrevocable except death.) … There are inadvertent consequences to supposing that something is what it is absolutely, without dilution - forever. In these terms such an absolutism can only be interpreted as an intention; rather than an investigated fact it represents a decision about the way something is to be seen: a decision that is apparently unalterable but on the other hand may eventually change. This kind literalisation of ‘the real’ therefore creates problems of reality. If I say that God exists for example (or for that matter “God doesn’t exist”) then the statement takes on an appeal that contradicts its seeming sense for it inducts us into the world of the fantastic - : a world that hinges on this absolute so that it takes on an occult or life-bound resonance: literally it says that it is from this that life originates.
(Thus: either, Life originates from God or: Life does not originate from God. One thing or the other; never neither.)
The absolutism promotes the idea that we can make the truth into whatever we like, to this degree: for it makes truth a matter of decision, which of course is the object, but inevitably given the mystical nature of this strategy it is possible only to encounter problems in this world, not the truth itself.
Much the same sort of inference is created by other absolutisms. By its nature this is what each such ‘truth of reality’ accomplishes: a window onto the fantastic is opened that can close only slowly. For what could be more appealing to the congenital fantasist? To the Nazi, for example. The main virtue is the absolutism. The absolutism attracts us because it inducts us into a world of infinity because the world that is described can exist only mystically. On the ground of a decision. A fantastic world is therefore proposed - a world that exists without limits. And where it is only in the context of the absolute that we can enter such a world - and this world cannot exist normally. Normally we are alive only in a world of limit. That is, Nazism proposes: if limit is not limit. So: the doctrine’s emotional authority; it is an authority born of a conflation. Of a mystical decision based on the hidden righteous prejudices of nightmare dreaming alive. The absolute is a truth twisted, without any safe fictional pinch of salt to obviate its foolishness. (Scientology.)