DOGMATIC INTERLUDE
It is perhaps easy to see how others are trapped within their dogmas, and impossible to see how one is trapped oneself. All criticism ought to take this starting point. As soon as I initiate an attack upon another’s dogmatic core, I must know that I am that which I seek to destroy. The post-modern thinker did become aware of the dogmas that surround us all, and reacted by refusing to judge others except those people who continued to judge others. Yet this abstention is a dogmatic process itself.
The One Dogma is automatically accepted and never opposed, like perfect weather. We do not notice the One Dogma as such, for it has always been there, like oxygen, since the time we are born. Immediately necessary yet never thought of—unless somehow it is taken from us, then we notice an absence quickly, even if we do not know what that absence may be. The One Dogma is now the air we breathe gone bad. It is life-giving oxygen that begins to destroy the life it sustains by free-radical damage. It is an unnoticed endosymbiotic organism that begins to consume its obligate host.
We are not aware of the things that determine our actions, for, as we become aware of those things, they no longer have the same control.
Now suppose that a dogma latched onto humankind at an early age and that this dogma ‘won out’ over other dogmas that died out. This dogma may have risen to dominance in hand with Homo sapiens, or perhaps dominated all species of the genus Homo prior to the rise of Homo sapien.
There exists a One Dogma that surrounds us all. The One is dogmatic, just like dogmatic capitalism or dogmatic theism, but unlike these dogmas, the One Dogma has no form to us. It has not yet been named. I cannot describe the One Dogma because I am trapped within it, and so are you, and we have nothing to compare the One against. The One determines my actions without my awareness like communism dogma determines the child’s actions when he lives in a communist country. The child has no awareness of the form of communism dogma, yet it directs her actions nonetheless. Every culture shapes its children through dogma without the child initially aware of that dogma. The child learns about the form of her dogma by being exposed to other cultures. The One is outside all comparison because, by definition, it encompasses all of humanity. Thus we live in the culture of the One, although culture is surely the incorrect word to use here—we live in the dogma of the one. There are political dogmas, religious dogmas, cultural dogmas…I cannot describe the One Dogma anymore than noting it encompasses us all, and by describing the nature of dogmas as I have in the previous chapter. The one dogma is neither political nor religious. I can speculate that the One Dogma was once a Freeing Idea, a directed form of primordial belief whose task was to grant us a type of freedom that is barely felt. We use words like awareness, consciousness, choice, and free will to describe this freedom, as well as the word freedom itself, but none of these concepts does justice to the One Dogma’s gift to us before it became dogmatic.
The One Dogma is in a death spiral; humanity will take collateral damage.