On Having no Choice.

Being above the Law and “Having no Choice”, have something in common. They both absolve a person of accountability, which is the essential condition for any public office. And if one cannot pardon oneself for ones own crime then the next best thing is not to be responsible for it in the first place.

Curiously, the legal test for a criminal insanity plea rests precisely on this issue of whether or not a person can help themselves,

“arguing that the defendant is not responsible for their actions due to an episodic or persistent psychiatric disease at the time of the criminal act.” wiki

but what does it mean, not to be able to help oneself, to have no choice?

Does it mean acting instinctively is a psychiatric condition?

Probably not. And then there is the conundrum that stating you had no choice, is the end result of reasoned consideration. Which doesnt make sense.

and it doesnt have to, which is precisely the joy of being unaccountable. Its a moral version of not filing your taxes. Not only can you shoot someoneon fifth avenue and get away with it. You can poop your pants and nobody on the bleachers will say a word.

Not being responsible for the consequences is a threat parents sometimes use to get junior to tidy his room, but not before his brother made him punch him in the head and trash the room to hell some more.

And so the worst of all scenarios is that the pudgy little digit on the button feels absolved of its actions. Disocciated. It couldnt help itself. It was compelled by some rogue pinky.

The problem is not a massively inflated ego, though it is a useful disguise of posturing competance, but that there is only the most tenuous internal cohesion held together by regular doubling down displays.

So the problem is that the decision to Nuke Korea is made by the part of him that also says it is not his responsibility. Unfortunately, “the devil made me do it” is not an empty get out of jail free card. Watching the reality TV show of absolute power corrupting absolutely you can observe the process of degenerative ego functioning. A recent speech at Fort Myers contained regards sent by his wife who was stood right next to him…..

The reality of the Deep State is out of the closet. Most folk know that no matter who you vote for the government and wealth get in, that politicians are the grey uniformed lackeys of Overlords who dont get out much….

it can be like that in the individual soul. The evicerated ego can become a kind of puppet, a golum for the Denizens of the unconscious that have their own agenda and the power to erode a mans critical faculties.

Its dangerous enough when the infantile part of a person grabs the wheel and starts dictating events. “He made me do it” gets fuelled with babyish rage and pretty soon you are all over the road.

The problem is that its not just the babyish part of a man that threatens his ego integrity. Jane Goodalls recent compared the antics of our Great Leader with the dominance rituals of chimpanzees..

“In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: Stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks.”

Her words are echoed by others in the Chimp hood..

“The top male essentially goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. Trump’s incendiary tweets are the human equivalent of a charging display.” Prof Dan McAdams.

And if that were not enough, the Chimps are in the safer end of the jungle which is full of all kinds of archetypal forces.

I have just seen a video clip on FB of a cop gunning down a man outside a convenience store for resisting arrest..

Someone commented, “getting up in that aggressive way was what got him shot”. The cop didnt kill him. He killed himself. And perhaps the man who pulled the trigger believed that too, that he was simply witness to a suicide. The fact that he calmly emptied a clip of seven rounds into his chest at point blank range had nothing to do with him. It was his time.

When I commented, she said, “oh, well you have never been in that situation”, and I replied, “actually I have”, she responded, “then you should be more understanding.”

and there is the double bind of those that are no longer constrained by Principle of Relatedness. Things not making sense becomes a pious incomprehension of the Will of God in whose mighty Right Arm, you are now his Instrument.

The psycho beat cop, the bent Senator, the orchestrated oppression of the People is about more than greed. Its not just about angry babies stuffing themselves from the cookie jar, or mere hooting primates, they are also filled with the light of messianic riteousness, Wotan personified.

The God who had no choice.

and its better than coke.

Of course Wotan wishes to live in the natural freedom signified by the Rhinegold..

“but cannot because if he does his power as a ruler will be destroyed along with the order on which his authority is based.” S. Williams.

Wotan, God of Doubling Down.

God of War.

 

 

 

The End is Nigh, Again.

Apparently, tommorow is supposed to be the End of the World.

I hope you have packed your things.

The curious thing about Doomsday prophecies is not simply the supreme consistency with which they have all been wrong thus far…

…but that being eternally wrong doesnt deter people from further speculation. You begin to suspect that there is more going on than fear of God or Death. The fervour with which such things are peddled suggests something more interesting than Eternal Damnation is afoot.

But what could it be?

Having folk forever examining their consciences on the premise that the earth is imminently about to open up and swallow them whole, is a good way of keeping potential miscreants in line. Its also got to make you feel pretty damned important to be there at the time. You would be eligible for a free T-shirt,   “Armaggedon, I was There”, with a skull and cross bones motif, just to show how hard you are.

You might give legitimate consideration to the thought that there is just a little passive aggression in exaggeratedly running about to dodge a falling sky, or loudly announcing that Gods Wrath will be visited on Teatime.

Its scary. Nursery will never be the same again.

Perhaps membership of an Apocalyptic Cult fills some unacknowledged need that attending church socials just doesnt quite cut. Meet and Greet is hardly as punchy as having ringside seats to the Final Reckoning.

They do say that giving a person news on their imminent demise has a somewhat invigorating effect on the psyche. Having your time left measured by a wristwatch can be positively galvanising.

Maybe if we were to look at individual responses to knowing the exact time of their own death we might get some insight into this collective phenomenon of being eternally preoccupied with the End of the World..

and not just because we can now do that to ourselves…

Convicted criminals whose countdown to the rope or the chair comes close to the catastrophic expectation of a collision with Planet X or the vengeful fires of Yahwehs wrath.

How prisoners face their end seems to be the same the world over. They obsess about food and need more than usual amounts of bathroom time. The famous last meal is our human response to the helplessness and horror of being dragged towards a death that someone or something has arranged for you.

Sometimes the prisoner comforts themselves with something that reminds them of home and childhood. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber wanted mint chocolate chip ice cream. Ricky Ray Rector wanted Pecan Pie he decided to save for later. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy went the whole hog and had shrimp, a bucket of KFC chicken, fries and several pounds of strawberries.

The exception to the rule seems to be Victor Fueger, hung in Iowa at the age of 28, who asked for a single unpitted olive, though, to be fair, it was in the hope that the olive would grow into a tree above his grave as a symbol of peace….

So human response to death being a tad more concrete than at-some-point-in-time is to feast and comfort themselves in any way they can. Eat, drink and make merry for tomorrow you die.

The main difference between the convict being marched down the Green Mile and the End Timers is that the folk all dressed in white gathering on the hillside at dawn of the appointed day are all really glad to be there.

Why?

Because if you are riteous and sorry and about to die but still somehow out and about on your own recognizance you might feel entitled to be exempted from the rules for a spell. After all, it is a special occasion.

And so it makes you wonder if our preoccupation with having life cut short represents a secret need to be momentarily freed of the repressive attitudes that cannot help but lurk beneath first-and-only. A wish for some brief respite from the Treadmill and all the life denying rules and expectations that go with it. A need to eclipse whatever it is that promotes meanness, that taboos tenderness and intimacy. Something both to mend and to remember the trauma of being ripped from the Great Mother.

After all, what does your town do if you are all convinced the world ends tommorow? You forgive your enemies, make love and party till dawn.

 

 

The Lure of Automatic Pilot.

Pizza Hut have bought out a trainer. Embossed on the tongue of the shoe is a button that you can press to order pizza. It sends out a GPS location to your nearest convenient franchise and..

boom..

pepperoni at your fingertips.

In Greek mythology the magical shoes were Hermes department. He had a pair of winged sandals that allowed him to pass between Olympus and the Mortal Plane. The magical shoes mediated between worlds just as they did for Dorothy in her travels between Kansas and Oz.

Very handy.

The capacity to mediate between worlds with enchanted footwear is the nub of a developmental stage in childhood characterized by symbol formation which magically uses transitional objects to manage the gap between Self and Other. It is the essential condition for passing from “first-and-only”, wherein hell is other people, to “being-amongst-others”, where we not only learn to tolerate otherness but are redeemed by it.

“You are therefor I am.” Satish Kumar.

This shift of perspective, is from what the Gnostics called “hylic consciousness”,  It comes from the Greek “hyle”, meaning husk, the unnourishing and winnowed part of an ear of wheat and is characterized by the person who simply lets themselves live without reflection or enquiry…

” He takes life as it comes and does not worry about the problem of meaning, its worth or its purpose. He devotes his time to the satisfaction of personal desires, enjoyment of the senses, riches, ambition.” R. Assagioli.

Transition from ego as landlord to the experience of no longer being master in ones own house is expressed in the Alchemical tradition as “the problem of three and four”.

..as taxing as divvying up a pizza between an odd number of people..

because three into four wont go. The conscious mind and the denizens of the deep Psyche are like oil and water. Making it across a threshold that demands acknowledgement and valuing of the Other without being swallowed up by them..

and with Pizza trainers instead of Hermes sandals for help…

is a way more tricky business than you might imagine..

“Not a few have perished in our work.” Alchemical saying.

A modern fairytale that expresses this sense of crisis and shows how it is resolved comes from an unexpected source, Robocop.

The hero Murphy has his humanity stripped from him and is largely reduced to robotic functioning, a fate suffered by many who adopt the first-and-only stance because it…

” contains the archetypal, omnipotent, defensive and mechanical, as well as the manipulative and destructive nature of Robot.” Lederman

The robot adaptation of the narcissistic character is, however, not entirely negative. Robocop can be redeemed by a combination of two factors. One is that his partner, Lewis, continuously reflects his humanity back to him. Her unflagging faith that he is in there somewhere gives him the courage to explore his obscure situation. Second, he finds his own dramatic solution to the problem of three and four.

Robocop has three protocols, 1) Uphold the law. 2) Serve the public trust. 3) Protect the innocent. As you might expect in any fairystory there is a hidden fourth directive which is entirely incommensurable with the first three..

Do not rise up against your masters.

Becoming conscious of this contradiction throws Murphy into turmoil. The law must be upheld… depending on who is involved. Serve the public trust, for as long as it serves the masters to do so. Protect the innocent, if its expedient…

Murphy realises hes been forced into a catch 22 situation that he cant win. Unless.. he plunges his hands into a massive electric generator that wipes out his programming but also nearly kills him.

Wright speaks of,

“the traumatic birth of self-consciousness, erupting into the still intact (and mechanical) symbiosis with mother.”

Realising that you harbour hidden and contradictory injunctions is shocking. Rewriting the inner script means first realising that you are being run from within by something so old, so habitual, so not-self that you can lose sight of its operation.

Folk simply clank through the day on automatic pilot fulfilling ancient expectations which may once have ensured survival but now serve the demoted purpose of simply keeping oneself on an even keel, maintaining the comfort zone, making sure reality does not intrude or question the preferred construct.

People will go to extraordinary lengths to keep the automatic pilot going because what they are up against is not a mere addition of information, another nut for the store house, but a shift of paradigm that threatens to bring the storehouse down.

Be careful what you wish for…

A good example of this is the story of Hiroo Onoda a Japanese soldier who continued to fight WW11 untill 1972 in the Phillipine jungles. He did this because he absolutely refused to believe that Japan could have surrendered. It was inconceivable. Surrender was more ignoble than suicide, something he had been expressly ordered against. Could his superiors be any the less accountable?

And so he fought on.

Many people have an inner Hiroo, an old soldier still fighting yesterdays battles,  disrupting the present with archaic material, fused to the Motherland, crushing the possibility of change or anything unscripted.

Over the years great efforts were made to persuade him that the war was over. Leaflets were dropped, photos and newspaper articles, all regarded by Hiroo as propaganda, fake news.

He was finally persuded only by hearing of Japans surrender from the lips of his own commanding officer, Major Taniguishi.

“Suddenly everything went black. A storm raged inside me. What had I been doing for all these years?” Hiroo Onoda.

Hiroo got a big shock, but he also went on to become a philanthropist and even donated some of his considerable back pay to local Phillipine projects as well as setting up a school Japan.

Many folk never get out of the Jungle. They remain omnipotently fused with the mother/land, content with the replacment of their autonomy by rows of endless choice, something to keep you occupied, hey, how about these new shoes you can get. They order pizza.

When Hate trumps Love..

Love hurts for a number of obvious reasons, the sudden prospect of loss through mere parting, through to real abandonment or betrayal. Worst of all, perhaps, the ardent striving of till-death-do-us-part which really does end at the mouth of an open grave.

But there is a hurt to Love we are generally more reluctant to admit, one that makes us ambivalent in our quest. Failing to address this knotty undermining of our own efforts to love and be loved makes it seem as though all these impediments to happiness come from outside,

from unfair stuff happening…

and wicked others.

Fessing up to the fact that you subvert your own goals and aspirations is a perplexing and deflating experience. There is something in the mix that the rational mind has failed to take into consideration..

And it is this…

” the meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.” C G Jung

Conversing converts.

Intercourse interrupts.

Love hurts because who you think you are dies with the experience, along with stuff you thought was important but isnt. Being bent into a new shape, having your sense of self deconstructed by Cupids arrow, is as much a crisis of identity as it is expansive liberation precisely because your borders are suddenly stretching over different parts of the map.

“Each becomes an object of knowledge and perception by the other, which has a wounding or violating effect.” E Edinger.

This deters us from reaching out with all the instinctual urgency of self-preservation. Reaching in…. to previously unknown aspects of Self, is just as dubious a prospect since such Unknowns have a way of rewriting our scripts and job descriptions. Its far more tempting to convince yourself that the Other is whatever you already know of it and that you are the captain of your ship.

Love also requires that we keep our mouths shut. I was impressed by a line in a case history by analyst and author Nina Coltart where her client thanked her for all the things she didnt say.

Hate is a lot easier. It requires little regulation of oneself and sports the dual benefits of both eradicating anxiety and cementing identity.

Purveyors of Hate are selling something very attractive, the kind of knowing-who-you-are and certainty of purpose denied to Love who is fretful, perplexed, bewildered.

Though Hate is most often..

“the wish to destroy that which cannot be controlled or dominated.” Otto Kernberg.

a balanced veiw has to include the possibility that Hate is not entirely destructive. The Greek story of Hephaestus, thrown from Olympus by a hating Hera, tells of a Being betrayed on all sides and physically disabled by the violence of his youth, yet he becomes the greatest of all craftsmen, his smithing arts and jewellery known throughout the world.

So Hate can be transformed. It can be forged and hammered into something else. Why? Because it generally started out being part of a legitimate situation that only latterly gets expressed inappropriately and out of context.

The problem with the way Malignant Narcissism hates, is its need to do so. Hate is used as the glue to hold oneself together and to adhere oneself to others without having to be changed in the process. You can have your corndog and eat it….though the fine print in such a generous offer involves you being eternally driven from within.

Analyst Guntrip quotes from a patient, “I can only keep myself going by hating, I cant stop fighting, I wont give it up. I cant give in. I feel I will lose everything if I do”.

It becomes imperative not to experience the worth of others. In fact, the worth of others humiliates me, casts me down. You cannot be smart without me being stupid. You cant be beautiful without saying I am ugly. Your brightness besmirches me..

and so Im gonna get you back.

The Narcissistic character must destroy outwardly in order to co-here inwardly because his Ontological security is rooted in antagonism..

and because I like to be offensive.

What he refuses to entertain, the delights of affrontery notwithstanding, is that he does so in order not to be a separate and autonomous person with his own ledger, with his own life to live and death to die. He affronts to remain little. Babies say anything. He does this by attributing all the goodness, youth and aliveness of others to himself. He sucks the life out of the world so that he can remain omnipotntly identified with the Good, which means that others must be actively turned into things, deprived of the qualites that comprise personhood, deprived even of legality and citizenship.

You cannot belong..

why should you, if even with my Billions I feel that I do not?