Absurdity and Reality

The Ephemerality of Absurd Realities

American politics has descent into a state of absolute absurdity. Where once I was drawn
into anger and sadness by the many atrocities committed both internationally and
domestically in the name of American Exceptionalism and Pax Americana, the Trump vs.
Clinton ‘Presidential Election’ has given rise to a decay in the American Political Sphere
that inspires ridicule and laughter. The tinges of this absurd reality have been percolating
through American Politics for years in the form of political satire shows like the Colbert
Report and the Daily Show, and indeed the rise of absurdity from its base in the fallacy of
the two party binary model of domination was in plain sight through the rise of the
neoconservative and ‘tea party’ movements (be it the diddling simplicity of G.W. Bush or
the baseless labeling of Obama—previously a constitutional law professor at the University
of Chicago—as a Kenyan Muslim who wants to bring Sharia Law to the US), but the past
year has seen this cancer spread to the whole of the US Body Politic. Reality has been
rendered satirical, satire often seems plausible, and all I can do is laugh.

In ‘practical’, material and social terms, the absolute absurdity of contemporary US

politics unsurprisingly inspires fear in many observers, but from the perspective of a more
holistic metaphysical perspective on reality and our existence therein it seems that absurdity
may be a good sign. We perceive things as absurd and thus laughable because they are out
of touch with our understanding of the potential boundaries of reality; satire is funny
because it melds reality with that which cannot be real. Can something absurd—something
that evokes such visceral emotional and intellectual responses that negate its reality—have
any sort of eternal reality or truth, or is American Politics simply a mirage of four-
dimensional time that, in its laughable absurdity, is doomed to an end in nonexistence?
Can the absurd be believed to have any sort of eternity?

The Boggart Politic

The absurd reality of contemporary American Politics has inspired a great deal of fear in
the public mind. But if absurdity is to be understood as doomed to nonexistence by its
implicit unreality, and if fear is inspired by the unreality of the absurd, might fear be of the
same ephemeral mirage be thus doomed to the very same nonexistence? Can fear be
dispelled as easily as the ‘reality’ of the absurd? Is fear to be vanquished by laughter?

Aristotle made the distinction between

Truth, which lacks motion and is thus

eternal, and

Fact, which is Truth with motion and thus incommensurable with eternity. Is it

not the lack of Truth in a Fact that renders it as absurd? Motion without Truth is absurdity,
and so the absurd lacks the reflection of Truth and thus Eternity that allows the four-
dimensional world of facts to participate in the Eternal. As such, that which is absurd must
eventually cease to be.

As with the Boggart in the Harry Potter Mythos, our darkest fears are indeed

dispelled by laughter.

Ridiculous! In their absurdity, the ‘rationales’ of our fears are

recognized for the ephemeral mirage in the ever-changing weave of fourth-dimensional
time-space reality that they are; nothing which is absurd can crystalize as a fixed point in the

timelines and must therefore be doomed to eventual decay into nonexistence. Absurdity,
and thus fear, is as ephemeral as the Boggart’s mirage of our darkest fears. Absurdity, along
with the fear that its tangible visage attempts to inspire, lacks eternity, and in lacking eternity
it must eventually cease to be.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton lack Eternity as their satirical absurdity negates

the potential that their Fact is Truth with motion. Their absurdity means that they cannot
be real in any eternal sense (i.e. on founded upon Truth), and indeed the notion that they
are ‘real’ is quite laughable. The moral of this story is to stop living in fear of absurd
manifestations and instead try to laugh, for in such active recognition of absurd unreality’s
ephemerality you negate its potential for continued existence.

Vermin Supreme

While often ignored due to his conscious existence in the sphere of absurdity, Vermin
Supreme may have (in the context of the above) developed the most fruitful possible
strategy for negating the ‘absurd reality’ of US political sphere.

“Vermin Supreme: When I'm President Everyone Gets A Free Pony”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d_FvgQ1csE

Rather than taking the US political system as real or thus deserving of fear, seriousness or
sorrow, Vermin works to negate the system’s very potential for reality through bringing us
to recognize and laugh at its abject absurdity.

Material Consequences

“There is no sin.
It is you who make sin exist,
When you act according to the habits
Of your corrupted nature;
This is where sin lies.”

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“…It is you who have made sin exist …Sin is not inherent in things, nor is it some element of the cosmos, nor
of human nature. Yet it is definitely found in the way human nature is translated. It is a disorientation of
desire, a kind of overlooking or missing the goal.”

2

There is no doubt that our acceptance of the absurd as real gives rise to a great deal of
injustice and suffering in this world. This is not a call to simply dismiss the suffering of
individuals who fall into the web of domination and created orders that is US Empire.
Instead, the intention of this piece is to remind readers that we have the control to
transcend the unreality (i.e. the lack of Truth and thus Eternity) of absurd manifestations
through recognizing their absurd lack of Truth and giving active manifestation to this
recognition through laughter. In absurdity we render ‘sin’, the cause of suffering, into an
unreality that necessitates its negation as a potential for manifestation. Maybe redemption

1

“Gospel of Mary Magdalene” P. 7 15-19, Trans. Jean-Yeves Leloup, p. 25

2

Ibid. 50.

of time and space is to be found in laughter at the absurdity of that which inspired suffering
and fear…

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A Fight for Resonance
Cassandra’s plight—knowing what is going to happen, trying to explain what is going to
happen to those who lack eyes with which to see, undergoing the emotional process of
accepting what will happen, etc.—does not soften the fact of the matter when it comes to be.
The visceral trauma of the collective consciousness, be it from hate, bloodlust,
hopelessness, fear or sorrow, is by no means dulled by knowing that it will come to be.
Absurd and unreal as the facts of our world are in their lack of resonance with Truth and
Goodness, no matter the lack of eternity implicit in such absurdity, the knotted energies of
the collective consciousness that have formed around this transient manifestation leave a
foul taste in my emotional being. The general resonance of humanity has been drawn into
the rank pit of hopelessness, fear, anger and hatred.

Trump does not represent the birth of this emotional and psychological virus.

Hopelessness, fear and their manifestation as anger, hatred and the like are the hallmarks
of the dominating influence that has seen the devolution of humanity and its ‘exile from
paradise’. This influence says that we must create order through domination, sees the
world as an eternal struggle between ‘good and evil’ and positions nature, emotion, desire
and the feminine as an eternal, chaotic other that must be brought into order through
domination. It allows us to choose ‘the lesser of two evils’, to make a knowing pact with
malice, vengeance and domination (i.e. the manifestations of perversion) because we accept
‘evil’ (which is to say privation of the good through perversion) as a necessary constituent of
the cosmos.

Fear will not save us from fear. Hopelessness will not bring hope. Anger enlivened

by anything other than the Love of Eternal Truth is as a fire run loose in dry brush.

The struggle of our generation must be recognized for what it is—resonance. Will

we allow ourselves to be lead into the abyss of fear and hopelessness, of anger and hatred
fueled by the discord with eternal harmony brought on by fear and hopelessness, or will we
struggle for a new resonance? In resonance with the eternal—with Love, Goodness, Beauty,
and Truth, the attributes of infinite nothingness—the potential for fear and hopelessness,
evil, and the ‘sin’ we create through the resonance manifest therein ceases to be as that
which has no place in the eternal must eventually cease to be.

The struggle of our generation is one of resonance. It is a struggle to transcend the

dualities that have been imposed upon our collective consciousness, to ascend to a
resonance in which evil is stripped from the potentials of manifestation. The forces against
whom we struggle endeavor to keep humanity bound in the chains of fear and
hopelessness. If we submit to such a resonance we cannot be free.

The struggle for liberty in our generation will not be found in policy change or a

new president, in a new economic system or a dismissal of all forms of social organization,
but in the conscious evolution

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of our being in time, our resonance, towards a harmony

3

Barnesmoore, “Redemption in Sorrow”

https://www.academia.edu/19513788/Redemption_in_Sorrow

4

Barnesmoore, “Conscious Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”.

with the eternal in which the absurdity

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of our present state is relegated (as it must

necessarily be) to nonexistence. This is a metaphysical conflict that can only be achieved
through actively pursuing the evolution of our body, emotion, mind and soul into a state
that is in resonance with the eternal.



Luke R. Barnesmoore is Co-Founder/Director of the University of British Columbia
Department of Geography’s Urban Studies Lab, Executive Director of the Center for
Critical Interdisciplinary Studies 501(c)3 and Associate Editor of Environment and Social
Psychology (Whioce).

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Barnesmoore, “Absurdity and Reality”.