Mad Kings Who Refuse to Fall
When the End Is Denied, Catastrophe Is All That Remains
I created the Communal Illusion section in mid-January of this year. At the time an image of unidentifiable fury was pressing against the inside of me. The theme I felt was right for dragging that nameless fury into the open was Communal Illusion. The concept has its origin in Theory of Communal Illusion, published in 1968 by the thinker Yoshimoto Takaaki at the peak of Japan’s student movement.
Theory of Communal Illusion is a brief work of inquiry, yet it discloses an abyss that no one before had thought to open. The sensibility and intuitive power of a thinker always run far ahead of the era. Yoshimoto developed an enormous body of thought before leaving this world in 2012. The responsibility left to those of us who came after is immense.
Since encountering the advanced thinking of his system of illusions I have been deeply moved and have continued my own independent inquiry. But I have come to feel that thought, in this sense, is clearly a different domain from philosophy as an activity of the brain. In the Japanese context it might be called a philosophy of the gut.
This relationship between brain and gut can be understood in contemporary terms as the brain-gut axis. In a medical context the brain-gut axis refers to the close mutual influence that the brain, which governs cognition and emotion, and the gut, which governs digestion and immunity, exert on each other through the autonomic nervous system, hormones, and gut microbiota. But that is a physiological account. My own view is that thought in this deeper sense is born from a new territory that emerges when the gut nullifies the cognition and emotion to which the brain assigns absolute primacy.
What led me to this feeling was the strong conviction that Yoshimoto’s Theory of Communal Illusion cannot be understood through the brain. Every time I attempted to grasp it through the brain I felt his thought pass straight through me as emptiness. For this reason I chose not to approach Yoshimoto’s intellectual universe through cerebral understanding but through actual movement, through fieldwork. The book is structured around the Kojiki, compiled in 712, the Gishiwajinden, compiled by the Chinese side in the third century, and the folklorist Yanagita Kunio’s Tono Monogatari.
These texts survive as written works and it is certainly possible to feel as though you have understood them as knowledge. But how much power does understanding thought as knowledge really carry? When we reduce thought to knowledge we may be unconsciously discarding a vital dimension of what it means to be human. That suspicion arose in me.
This problem is self-evident from arguments that have been advanced in many parts of the world since ancient times. Ever since the primal psychic experience of alienation from natural existence, human beings have been fated to struggle with this problem without end. And this strange problem, at once deeply internal to the individual and yet capable of being universalized as something common to all human beings, continues to float within each of us with a pressing urgency even now.
The true question must therefore be placed here. Will you look at that internal problem, or will you ignore it? To stare into that internal problem is necessarily to see reality itself, and it comes with intense pain. Most people do not want to experience the anguish of this reality and choose to ignore it. But a small number of people possess the strong will to keep facing it. These are the people I hold in the deepest respect.
It is a problem that must be shouldered and carried forward for as long as we are human. Put differently, it is the problem of the origin.
A caution is needed. Origin is a concept entirely different from an individual’s ethnic roots. I have made the approach to this origin my central theme, and it is connected to my critical stance that universality does not reside in the transcendent world in which human beings reach toward a single absolute God imagined in the heavens. What I believe is that the universal for humanity lies not in an “exterior heaven” that transcends everything but in the “interior wellspring” reached by excavating one’s own origin to its very depths. It is the deepest cosmos, one that surpasses even the most personal of roots.
Put differently, no answer exists on the outside. People fall into the illusion that answers exist externally because things are generated by an invisible space within a place that has been alienated from the essence of reality. Neither place nor space is rooted in an actual location. Conceptually they are empty. What matters here is that the eyes with which people look outward have been alienated from their own interior. Those eyes are fabricated, fictitious eyes that are not connected to the person’s original form.
These fabricated fictitious eyes are not given by rulers, as many people mistakenly assume. They are generated and bestowed by the invisible space within a place that possesses no essence. And in this situation the interests of the space that has been formed and the interests of the individual who has the illusion of being absorbed inside that space will always be misaligned. The will of the individual therefore always stands in inverse relation within this space. This is why the interests of the community and the interests of the individual never coincide. Here lies the distinct movement of communal illusion and individual illusion.
We live our daily lives even now carrying this fierce internal struggle. Most people act as though the struggle does not exist. But events will always arise that force a sudden confrontation with the anxiety that has been concealed.
The present is precisely such an era. Because this is arguably the first time in human history that this confrontation is occurring as a simultaneous global event, it has become even harder for people to recognize than before. If the relationship among the communal illusion, the pair illusion, and the individual illusion that Yoshimoto Takaaki identified is ignored, events will inevitably head toward the worst possible outcome. And yet we are plummeting toward that worst outcome as though the bottom has fallen out. What exactly is this?
Unless the distinct movements of the different illusions are understood, the selfish and self-serving rampage of the rulers installed by the communal illusion cannot be stopped. And the true problem is that even if a symbolic leader is overthrown, the situation will not change. Because symbol and illusion are different things. Even if an individual exercises leadership through charisma, that person is merely seen as a symbol by the masses. They are not creating the illusion itself. The communal illusion operates on a principle by which it cannot be altered by the individual illusion at the individual level.
Yet rulers who ignore this fact continue today to invade other countries without hesitation, to abduct and slaughter the leaders of other nations, and to construct systems of governance that serve only their own convenience. And because the individual illusion always stands in inverse relation to the communal illusion, the faithful faceless entities within the communal illusion who have voluntarily submitted and lost their individuality possess an extremely efficient capacity for executing the directives of these violent rulers.
In 1960 the film director Kurosawa Akira released The Bad Sleep Well and gave brilliant cinematic expression to this invisible structure. We all know that when human beings are seen one by one they possess goodwill, a sense of justice, and compassion. But an individual who has voluntarily submitted to the communal illusion is not the individual in the sense we idealize when we speak of one. This subtle misalignment becomes a catastrophic fracture as the world descends into devastation. To speak of goodness and justice to individuals at this level is therefore entirely futile.
And yet even in the most extreme circumstances, whether or not one participates in slaughter is decided by the individual’s own choice.
The single finger that pressed the button to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have refrained if that individual had possessed the will. The military aircraft could have turned back. But he did not refrain. He pressed the button, and in an instant so brief that the word instant does not suffice, he slaughtered a vast number of people who had nothing to do with the war. Through the act of pressing down on a button with the force of a single finger, slaughter was carried out without hesitation. We today use the power of a single finger day and night on our computers and smartphones. That this alone is sufficient to slaughter all of humanity is something that has been forgotten.
Of course, if the pilot had turned back without pressing the button he would have been cursed, beaten, imprisoned, and executed by his superiors. On the battlefield such an act means summary execution.
Even if that individual had not pressed the button, someone else would have. Given human foolishness, this is a fact. But if we truly believe in the power of individual will, then not pressing the button is also possible. Whether one is killed as a consequence of holding to that will is not actually the problem. What matters to a human being who possesses dignity is whether or not one holds to the will. The people of the world have now forgotten this.
In war it is those who pressed the button who receive the medals and the praise. We are given no opportunity to know the people who held to individual will and did not press it. Such people have surely existed in reasonable numbers throughout human history, and they surely exist in reasonable numbers even now.
The Edo-period Confucian scholar Sato Issai wrote, [憤一字、是進学機関] (The single character [憤] is the mechanism for advancing in learning. To be moved upon encountering the things of the world, and to establish one’s resolve. This is the instrument for advancing in study). The character [憤] (hun) is generally interpreted through the compound [発憤] (happun), meaning to rouse one’s spirit. But my own sense is that what is truly meant is [憤怒] (funnu). [憤怒] is more than great anger. It is the anger that comes from an uncontainable indignation. It is entirely different from venting dissatisfaction at the external world.
In truth, my own ongoing independent study is something no one told me to do and no one taught me to do. It is driven by a [憤怒] that wells up like magma from the deepest part of my interior. And learning must always be undertaken for the sake of someone.
When that which should end refuses to end, history dictates that it will run amok and arrive at ruin. Against the rulers of the present who repeat this pattern without thought, we must carry a fierce [憤怒] and approach the origin by fulfilling our own mission.
My commitment to this theme over the course of years is not because I wish to disclose unknown aspects of Japanese history. To write articles that merely introduce something would be an act of unconscionable irresponsibility now that the leader of Iran has been slaughtered at the behest of certain elements within the US government.
The destination of Communal Illusion is not Japan. It is the origin. By origin I mean the conviction that beyond the point where the communal illusions of every nation and every people have been excavated and every ornament has been nullified, there exists a final place where the truly resolute people of the world, carrying [憤怒] within them, will gather.