Voices Finally Heard

Reading a fascinating blog entry at a fascinating blog, I found myself deeply appreciating the following paragraph. It somehow captures something I understand about "the messiah being amongst us" - created through our joint and participatory experience - rather than being literally in an individual.

 

I suspect this is a significant theme in most religions (including Chrstianity - though there it is often played down in favour of other interpretations of the Jesus character).

Here is the paragraph:

Ritual theory explains a general population becoming excited under the influence of mass consciousness, but may overly contaminate the understanding of an effort to emulate or mimic a ‘successful design for living'. An obvious (and soon to be over clichéd) example, the success of the Barack Obama's election campaign, may have a lot more to do with active participation than the appeal of a leader. From the perspective of community development, what is forgotten is that at least a portion of Obama's campaign's success is due to people feeling that their voices were finally being heard, that they could at long last make a difference, and were therefore motivated to take action. Mass mediated culture can indeed be confiscated to serve and emancipate.