Posted by It is surprising how many people are happy to conform today with any Government mandate, regardless of whether it is experimental or dangerous. Colin Wilson once wrote of the human condition: “The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain”.
Wilson wrote about those who don’t conform, of course, the “outsiders” who don’t follow the Establishment narrative and thinking. People who don’t blindly accept conformity.
Humanity has always been easy to control due to the overriding tendency of humanity to ‘obey’, to do what it is told, without question. This ‘conformity’ of humanity has been written about across the centuries, but a famous example is in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”, written a century and a half ago, where Ivan Karamazov has a dream where Jesus returns and is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor and is asked why he has come back talking about “freedom”. The Grand Inquisitor says, people don’t want freedom anymore, they want bread, and security, and circuses. In the post-2020 world of virus threats and humanity, that may be correct.
But it is Colin Wilson’s writings that bring us to a small 100-page novella by Hermann Hesse entitled “Journey to the East”.
The journey is a journey of the mind mainly, not a road trip. Hesse was really writing about his mind, in 1932, and his journey didn’t take him anywhere in third-dimensional solid matter. When I first read the book, I was on my way to university, and had yet to realise that there were other realities, more real actually, than the world we live in here. Kurt Leland called that world “Otherwhere”.
It was through the writings of Colin Wilson that I first came across Hesse’s writing. This was in Colin Wilson’s 1955 classic, The Outsider, which was a summary of the work of the leading existentialists of that time, such as Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Gaugin, Wells, Dostoevsky, and many more, but one writer that had fallen into obscurity was Hermann Hesse, who died in 1962. Between the writings of Wilson and (in the USA) Timothy Leary and Ram Das (Richard Alpert), Hesse suddenly became the new “holy man of the hippies” and sales of his books rocketed after the Vietnam War.
Hesse’s writings were essentially one long biography, the meanderings of his real life, and the journeys in his mind. He was a social outsider, continually breaking the “ties that bind”, and struggled to maintain the links to the normalities of reality. This appealed to the new youth of America and Britain, who had started to sense that something wasn’t right in the world, and anyway were rebelling against the conservatism of the time and the increasing soulless nature of modern life.
In “Journey to the East”, Hesse talks about the eternal strivings of the human spirit towards the ‘East’, towards Home. He says:
“The knowledge passed through my mind like a ray of light and immediately reminded me of a phrase which I had learned during my novitiate year, which had always pleased me immensely without my realising its full significance. It was the phrase from the poet Novalis, ‘Where are we really going? Always home!”
That is a beautiful phrase. Of course, now, the Controllers want to cut us off from our connection to ‘home’, they want to transform us into centrally-controlled transhumans, whose thoughts, words, writings and movements are all controlled and monitored. Will there be any place in the future for the individual or will we all be conformists?
15 May 2022
[Book review: Hermann Hesse – “Journey to the East”]
Piers Morris Blogspot 