What is art an antidote to??

Viewing the world through a beauty-seeking lens can be medicine for the following effects of the current pervading global culture:

 monism, difference anxiety, and inability to hold multiple truths.

There is an omnipresent motive underlying western thought and society of conversion and assimilation- and with that comes discomfort with personal and cultural differences. Philosopher Rajiv Malhotra coined this as ‘difference anxiety’. Simply put, we believe  similarities are  morally superior to differences.

moral decay  and symbolic poverty

In Man and his Symbols, Jung describes a moral decay that happens when ‘primitive’ cultures are introduced to modern society. The main effect is the loss of our ability to assimilate anything instinctive or unconscious. Both Jung and ML Von Franz refer to modern religions as anemic, deficient of their numinosity. The pursuit of rationalism has brought us to an imbalance, and the pendulum must swing back. The only way to combat what I’ve seen referred to as ‘symbolic poverty” is to create new mythologies, drawing on ancient ones.

“As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional “Unconscious identity” with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightening his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, mor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.”

apathy, or lack of interest

As humanity’s consciousness has evolved, we’ve reached a place of ultimate intelligence and separateness. This individualism has helped us develop egos and personalities that ancient people did not have. But it has also brought loneliness, materialism, and anti-social forces. We must make conscious efforts to connect with each other if we are to survive this late-stage capitalism, and that starts with having interest in others, which can be quite difficult. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference and disinterest. 

“Apathy separates us from the world, while interest unites us with it. The world loses us through our apathy: in this direction we become immoral. Thus, we see that apathy and lack of interest in the world are morally evil in the highest degree” -Rudolf Steiner

ahrimanic technocracy

In my belief that our divinity lies in our art-making, that we are created in the image of the creator, that we are the creator, I rebuke artificial intelligence. AI is a furthering of the tyrannical, white supremacist forces and the work of Ahriman. (In anthroposophy, ahriman is the being we must find balance with in opposition to lucifer. Ahriman wishes to unite humanity with matter in a calcification process, separating our intellectual capacities from our soul and heart forces.)