THE FETISH IN THE SPECTACLE

On the nature and forms of redemption
introducion

Human beliefs and practices in relation to the sacred, numinous, spiritual and divine

Building collective intelligence depends on creating a "context" in which this intelligence can emerge in the first place. These are situations in which people, issues, experiences and learning processes intertwine to produce new insights. This can happen accidentally or in the performance of rituals.

It has somehow always existed:
the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Emile Durkheim described this distinction as a central feature of the social reality of human religions. The sacred is said to refer to those collective representations that stand out from society or that transcend the everyday.
The profane, on the other hand, is everything else, all those everyday things like our jobs, our bills and our rush hour commute.

But when did this begin, that the sacred was removed from everyday experiences?
When and why does the sacred no longer penetrate this worldly reality?
When something is recognised as sacred, we certify that sacred has a quality that is beyond the material, physical world.

Hegel no longer had to interpret the world, but the transformation of the world.

Karl Marx's treatise on the commodity fetish did not initially find much significance for a long time, but today it is considered one of the central ideas of his critique of capitalism.

In his work Das Kapital, Karl Marx describes a quasi-religious, material relationship to products that people make for each other.
Before Karl Marx, Georg Lukács already recognised the commodity fetish in 1923 as an alienation from being human and saw in this fetish character that human beings degrade themselves into commodities and are thus are being reified.
We are still in that time that prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the idea to the reality, the appearance to the essence.
Worse still, now have to deal with these new images of virtuality. Now it seems that our orientation in the world is totally upside down.

At least we know that we are manipulated by images. Images make us believe that we belong, that we participate, that we know something. We know nothing, we can verify nothing and declare it to be the truth.

Finding the truth - that's a whole other topic again.....

So we are more alienated than ever.

In order to overcome this alienation as individuals and also as a society, we have to become aware again of what really counts in life. This may sound superficial, but it is not.
And it is actually quite simple: we only have to free ourselves from the many mainupualtions and these alien desires imposed on us.

This "liberation" has to do with our own social positioning within society. Where do we position ourselves? And this is not a question of wealth and financial background, but a question of free will. We cannot stop questioning, analysing and criticising the concept of society. Society is a process. Society is always changing and adapting.

But we have to agree with the social transformations.

Therefore, it is consequently necessary to also question the terms (such as questioning, analysing and criticising)

...a little hamster wheel.
And we can already see now that we will spin on the spot.

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