Sovereignty, Nightmares and the Collective Subsconscience

I had a nightmare last night about being given charge of a strange alien time vortex machine that looked like the Hadron Collider and could push time back and forward in endless frenzy.  The whole thing went into some demonic overdrive. I woke up sweating, heart racing.



Our son, Nat, burst into our room seconds later  saying he too had had a nightmare. I was too creeped out to ask if it was the same nightmare. That really would be a glitch in the Matrix!  Or, at this present moment should I rephrase that as a glitch in the "Maytrix."



Could I be tapping into some Jungian greater collective subconsciousness? Did we all have bad dreams last night? Well, I do not want to be too fantastical but it strikes me that the current political deadlock touches some very deep undercurrents in our society, much deeper than perhaps even the media and the politicians realise.

So, part of me obviously sees the idea of having a monster time machine that goes out of control even though my reason for having it is to gain control.  Perhaps this is a metaphor for where we are politically?

I have not tried online or anywhere else to divulge my vote because I am a bit old fashioned about clergy doing this. Impartiality is part of the pastoral service we offer to the widest possible number of people. However, there are interesting undercurrents that border on the metaphysical here. I suspect that this kind of deadlock is going to repeat itself over and over again across the West. Like Neo in the Matrix there is something quite hypnotic about this code, the digital rain, that is us passing by.

What I keep picking up is this subs-conscious code for sovereignty. I do not just mean the current tussle between parliamentarians and the government about 'who runs' Britain, or even between the argy-bargy about whether we run things by plebiscite or elected representatives.  For me the unanswered question is what lies beyond all of that? This is where raw democracy can lack a transcendent horizon. What underpins our sense of fair and unfair, right and wrong, good and bad? Who decides what these moral qualities are and who arbitrates over them?

In the past, even the recent past, this was the Judeo-Christian heritage. But, since the 1960s we have largely ditched our transcendent heritage across most of Europe. We now live in a post-Christian continent. Those Baby Boomer students who baulked at the past and rioted in 1968 claiming a new age... they now rule us. These postmodernists told us that being modern meant being in a constant state of discontinuity with the past. Authority had no authority. Everything should be questioned. All was up for grabs. Long live the revolution.

Well, you might think they were right. Perhaps they were? Yet, there are consequences of this hermeneutic of discontinuity.

Maybe - we were all too deferential in the past. But, let us not be naive to think that the alternative way of doing this will bring order or even..justice. Order is introduced now not by an appeal to a greater transcendental authority (eg. the Bible or natural law) but litigation, media spin, and grand distractions, etc.

I have a funny gut feeling my crazy time warp machine is going to be busy not just this week but years ahead.