June 2018 – Andy White Blog

Waking up to Wetiko, perspectives on Psychic Infection.

They say that what doesn’t kill, fattens, and its literally true. When plague sweeps through the community there really is more to go around. The Black Death did away with so many it gave rise to the middle classes and guilds of skilled labor. They grew significantly wealthier from family demises, achieving a redistribution of wealth denied the efforts of subsequent government.

Plagues aren’t good for those who succumb. But they are good for those that survive and now have fresh lines of microbial defense as well as a new rig.

Plagues are as useful to the species as they are deadly to the individual. Collective resources are increased and natural defenses strengthened through intensified selection. Research into Bubonic plague in rats shows that the virus concerned ‘manifests’ under certain environmental conditions. Its not that the virus is latent in the healthy rat. It occurs spontaneously when the relationship between resources and rat numbers get to a certain critical point. It happens when it wants to, when human poverty and oppression are at a certain pitch.

Perhaps psychological infections, especially those that sweep across Nations, can similarly have some constructive end result. Perhaps this kind of disease is also necessary, so as to find out who you are, what you are made of, at what point you draw a line or how it might serve you to submit.When I was nine or so, there was a girl in class who had unhappily managed to break her neck. She wore a clumsy, ancient NHS brace with leather chin straps that got wet with slobber and so of course she was bullied without mercy..

One day I found myself in a gaggle of kids in the cloakroom who’d surrounded this poor child, chanting that she had fleas and diseases, throwing her dufflecoat about from one nasty brat to another, as if it harbored the plague.

But it was me that had caught some plague. I had become infected by some kind of mob phenomenon. I’d quite happily laid into this poor child whose only fault was that she had been horrifically injured. Afterwards I felt ashamed and couldn’t explain to myself what had happened.

I was a good kid. Yes, there was the time when me and my mate Koli converted a cupboard into an operating theatre and performed heart surgery on unsuspecting lizards. And yes we should have known that Bostik was no substitute for stitches but we just didn’t have a needle and thread small enough so glue had to do.

And then there was the Fire Brigade we had, which created its own fires to put out but which we didn’t always quite manage and had to resolve by running away. That should probably raised a few flags but adding to the miseries of someone whose life had already been dealt a blow felt like a new low for me.

It wasn’t simply that I’d been raised by bullies, which I had. Laying into that vulnerable kid gave me a twisted thrill of belonging, something that can’t exist very well by itself in a young life already dominated by manic doing and achieving, value lying in what you produce rather than who you are, your approval (legality) conditional upon living up to often unspoken expectations requiring a rejection of self….

..which destroys belonging.

and because I didn’t belong, I was susceptible to the cozy shared instincts of play ground bullies and later the shared superiority of white supremacy and ‘Special Forces’. Its not for nothing that ‘the Mob’ is also called ‘the Family’ or that mobilized military units are suddenly, ‘a band of brothers.’

The thing about being a bully is that you have to keep at it. Without someone to pillory, feelings of unreality and alienation wing their way homeward. To be deprived of a vulnerable mark is to be filled back up with all the doubts and fears that it’s preferable to lodge in someone else. Let them be the one’s who do not belong. The ones who are illegal.

The Cree have a name for the malignant spirit that feeds on the humanity of others, ‘Wetiko’…

‘a pathological part of the psyche co-opts and subsumes all of the healthy parts into itself, so as to serve its pathology.’ P Levy.

The main problem with Wetiko is that it is contagious, as if permission had suddenly been given to indulge oneself without consequence, as though others were magically irrelevant, as though belonging denied in infancy were suddenly handed to you on a plate.

Wetiko is depicted as an evil spirit who can contaminate persons who don’t have a sense of belonging. It promises to fill the gap, but at the expense of a third party whose life force must be plundered for the spell to work. Where a person’s self structure is damaged or incomplete, Wetiko provides a temporary solution, though you are not to know yourself by the self-reflection of a bright mirror, but by having adversaries which have to be created if they do not already exist.

When Wetiko infects a single person it manifests as malignant narcissism. Because it is infectious and invites the route of least resistance without cost or consequence it can flourish like bindweed where the belonging/values experienced at the breast, the font of belonging, have been interrupted.

”Fascism is the outer, collective political expression of an individual’s ravaged inner landscape that has been crippled and suppressed..ibid

We have the idea that values are learned at Mother’s knee but they are learned much earlier or rarely at all. Everything that we are to know about our place in the world, our worthiness, our prospects for success, our relative security, is all learned at the in-arms stage of infant development.

The de-sacralizing of this early bond in favor of early ‘achievement’ has collective consequences difficult to imagine. It releases Wetiko upon the World.

” Chronic unsatisfied longing for acceptance can reinforce doing what is expected (by authority) to the point of self-destruction” Jean Liedloff.

The Cree solution to the problem of Wetiko might just as well come from the pages of a paper on the practice of psychotherapy. You have to talk to it.

‘As if performing a magic ritual, in exploring the entity of Wetiko, we first have to invoke its spirit and enter into relationship with it’. P. Levy

This has a way of creating some daylight between oneself and the infection suffered, space in which one’s own purpose and destiny might surface…

Without such an encounter within oneself, Wetiko continues unchecked by the external efforts of legislation or fresh leadership. Unacknowledged, the disease can only be experienced in its projected form, in the ‘flea infested’ dufflecoat of my injured classmate, or collectively as the ‘plague’ of migrants.

The rhetoric against the Unfortunate has to be ramped up if the spell is to work. Mr Trump has progressed his use of metaphor in describing migrants as murderers/rapists (still human) to animals (no longer human but warm blooded) to vermin ( an unpleasant subsection of the no longer human) to plague, which isn’t even warm blooded any more.

The irony is that these quarantined children are fleeing destabilization directly caused by the US meddling in the affairs of bordering states including the actual overthrow of democratically elected governments with the narcissistic maxim that you strengthen your position by weakening your neighbor.

The flood of asylum seekers that results from such destabilized regions are the waking dream that Narcissism attracts to itself. The denigrated and rejected anguish of Mother and Child for whom there is still no room at the Inn bang at the door as illegal plague. The shadow must rebound. If it won’t be realized as an aspect of one’s own nature it will come at you from the world instead.

Death Before Dishonor.

When I was still part of the Great White Hope and flying Special ops Fireforce missions in the Rhodesian war we’d occasionally come across enemy soldiers armed with wooden AK-47’s. Mostly this was a point of amusement and mockery. What did they hope to achieve with wooden guns?

No, really, WTF?

It really made me wonder.

You’d think that a highly organized team, fully tech’d up with all the mod cons of warfare, would prevail against a rabble armed with wooden guns. But the rabble had a weapon that Space Force did not. They were beyond the fear of death. Their wooden guns meant that the dishonor brought upon their people, centuries of being crushed and sucked dry, by me and mine, was redeemed. So it didn’t matter if some of their guns were made of wood, or not.

For some peculiar reason human beings who have been degraded beyond a certain point, who have been persistently lied to, cheated, robbed, dehumanized with violence or contempt, not only develop the kind of humanity unknown to the perpetrators, but they lose the fear of death. This makes them an entirely different prospect to the Troopie who draws his pay, has a mortgage and wants to go home to his wife at the end of the day, for whom ‘Death before Dishonor’ is just one more thing sewn into his shirt like branded merchandising.

There is something more important to us humans than life itself. ‘Death before Dishonor’, is more than battle incentive for potential quitters. Its a description of what happens in the borderlands of the Soul.

Back in the time of Tarquinus Superbus, a Roman King circa 500BC, a noblewoman called Lucretia was raped by his Son Tarquinus Sextus, to whom she had been giving the hospitality of her home. Lucretia’s subsequent suicide and the parading of her outraged body through the city rose the people up against Superbus and brought the era of Kings and Oligarchs to an end. Out of this was born the Republic. Our gut response to the dishonorable can be epoch changing.

The link between suicide and honor has a long history. The Samuri tradition of Seppuko, ritual disembowelment, goes back a thousand years, often accompanied by death poems.

This one is by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi the Japanese commander-in chief during the battle of Iwo Jima apologized for failing to successfully defend the island.

Unable to complete this heavy task for our country
Arrows and bullets all spent, so sad we fall.
But unless I smite the enemy,
My body cannot rot in the field.
Yea, I shall be born again seven times
And grasp the sword in my hand.
When ugly weeds cover this island,
My sole thought shall be [the future of] the Imperial Land.

In the Christian tradition such a gesture gets you excluded from hallowed ground. Its a bit odd. If the gesture of suicide is not only intended to redeem honor and effectively does so in the eyes of everyone connected with the event then why would the church sanction them so badly? Being kicked out of the graveyard club seems a bit harsh. I think its precisely because such an act speaks to a moral code way deeper than any chiselled stone. It is the law of the Great Mother. One way or another dishonor will not be endured.

One of my earliest memories is of our family dog having puppies. One of them was very aggressive and constantly stirring things up with his siblings, bullying , biting, fighting for the nipple when he was already full… Eventually, Momma picked him up and gave him a single shake, killing him instantly. She laid him down and went back to sleep with the more peaceable sibs contentedly feeding.

So death is equally a solution for the dishonorable is it is for the dishonored. It’s not a legislative thing, not about man made law or judicial punishment. What I had witnessed was the shadow of Momma’s unconditional love which is that when you fall out of grace you had best take cover.

The law of the Great Mother is what we call Conscience. Its a problem for us because its not a part of the structure of the personality and won’t come to heel. It exists outside and beyond the influence of ego. It is autonomous not because it has been split off from consciousness but because it was its own thing when the ego was still spitting up milk and way deeper than the parental shoulds and oughts that pepper nursery life.

Conscience is an archetype and as such runs her own court in the Psyche. Roy Stone reminded me about the Moira/Furies, dispositions of Nature, who acted as the executive arm of Conscience in Greek mythology. They famously sent Orestes mad on account of the fact that his father had killed his mother which required him to revenge her murder but be damned in his Paricide, and by the same law, in so doing.

The following is a dialogue from Aeschylus’ ‘Prometheus Bound..’

Chorus: Who then is the helmsman of Ananke (Necessity)?
Prometheus: The three-shaped (trimorphoi) Moirae and mindful Erinyes (Furies)
Chorus: Can it be that Zeus has less power than they do?
Prometheus: Yes, in that even he cannot escape what is foretold.

The Furies, winged goddesses sprung directly from Gaia, were not bound by any law except their own and would deal with transgressors of Natural Law whether human law had been implemented or not. One of the things they really can’t stand is dishonor in any one of its nasty, myriad forms. They help the dishonored by making them unafraid of death and put blades turn inwards into the hands of those who have dishonored themselves.

One of the reasons that great men double down when cornered by the consequences of their own Narcissism, is that should all their dirt be publicly laundered its like blood in the water to the Furies. The attendant dangers from legal sanction are actually secondary to those Judges within quite capable of giving our inflated selves a swift and mortal shaking. Until that time you are innocent of all charges even if your mouth is completely shmeered with cream and chocolate.

The pathological liar does so not to subvert truth but to create his own reality in the absence of having one that endures for longer than the time it takes to eat a big mack.. It’s a do-it-yourself self. The problem is that life’s lessons then need to keep being repeated until the Furies really lose their rag and whack you with something that can kill in lieu of your old ways being laid to rest.

The problem with such an open coffin arrangement is that you get a long hard look at yourself. Not only are there all the blemishes of your own failure to show up for yourself and others, but also the blotches of such learning in childhood that can no longer be idealized as being for your own good.

”In order not to die, all mistreated children must totally repress the mistreatment, deprivation, and bewilderment they have undergone because otherwise the child’s organism wouldn’t be able to cope with the magnitude of the pain suffered.” Alice Miller

Miller makes the connection between Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and his suppressed and thus projected hatred of his father who was half Jewish, allegedly.

”He was mercilessly and constantly driven to new destructive acts by his latent feelings of hatred and revenge.” ibid

We dishonor vulnerable others at our peril. Hitler’s mind set was formed at the hands of violent abuse. In fact you must wonder at the beginnings of anyone who then needs to spend the rest of their life clawing their way to power and what contortions Conscience will twist them into in order to keep living the lie.

If you find the detail the Hitler’s father was half Jewish compelling, given the extent to which he needed to purge his rage on surrogates, then it will be of equal interest that Trump’s Mother was an illegal immigrant given the recent attack on illegal immigrants maternal bond.

There’s not a lot you can know about a person’s relationship with their mother from the brochure. Trump’s mother was beloved, apparently. What you can know about is the women they than marry based on just how much unconscious (mater)ial informs the decision making process, or lack of it, in picking a mate.

Ivanka Trump once recounted that when she was truly disobedient, her mother would pull down her pants and spank her in front of Ivanka’s friends. “People are shocked, but she didn’t chase me around with a whip.” (Evening Standard.)

Which is a bit of an odd thing to throw away at the end of a sentence. Though it’s useful to wonder what the effects of being dishonored to such a pitch might do to someone’s aliveness.

The week before the election, she had submitted the manuscript for her book Women Who Work and anticipated the editing process. Executives at Portfolio, felt that the manuscript was ‘too devoid of emotion’. They asked her to add personal, engaging details about her relationship with her parents—”to make her seem like she had a pulse,” one person involved with the book explained. “Like she was a human.”)https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/how-donald-trump-fathered-a-loyal-army-of-mini-mes

”Psychological punishment constituting degradation and mistreatment of children always, sooner or later, has destructive consequences, whether visible or concealed.” A Miller

Being dishonored may not lead us to kill ourselves but it can make us die inside. A telling throw away remark from Trump tells you all you need to know about what he requires of his citizens. He says that he always wanted five kids, to be like the family he grew up in, ‘so then at least one of them can be like me.”https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05

Can you imagine hearing your parent say that? Either you are ‘in’ but have to check your own destiny at the door or you are ‘out’, not-like-me and failed. This is a symptom of ‘Symbiotic Omnipotence’ (Masud Kahn), a particularly virulent strain of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

It’s where mothers and sons are so idealized that their actual transactions are utterly marginalized in favor of the shining PR job on how fantastic they both are. The problem is that boys do not become men without whole mothers that exist behind the makeup, something Yahweh neglected when he cast his Ex Missus Hokmah/Sophia into the briny sea with millstones tossed afterwards to seal the occasion. So he never manages to grow up. Mother stays tied to him, runs him from within, while all the raging at this frustration of his own destiny then spills out over the World.

Hansel and Gretel.

How do Hansel and Gretel get the better of the Wicked Witch? They are in an absolutely desperate situation, yet still they manage to wriggle free.

Whilst Hansel languishes in his cage, the Witch compels Gretel to help her prepare the stove that will cook him. Gretel must be beside herself, almost paralyzed with shock and fear. The Witch tells Gretel to go get into the stove to check on the strength of the fire, thinking perhaps that she’d have an hors d’oeurve before the main course of roast boy. Anyway its fun to tell people what to do and push them around.

Gretel sees the slimmest chance and does the one thing sure to get the witch’s blind reaction. She plays dumb. ‘I, er, don’t know how to…” The witch can’t help herself exploding, ”Oh you helpless idiot! Must I do everything? Get out of the way, let me show you how…” and in she goes head first.. Gretel shoves her from behind, slams the door….

and so the witch’s goose is cooked instead.

Gretel turns things around in three ways..

Firstly she refuses to give up hope…

‘If you have a why, you can endure almost any how.” Victor Frankl

What keeps her going is love, even though she has been so terrorized that the Witch no longer considers her a threat and even gives her kitchen duties instead of sharing Hansel’s cage. Throughout the story the abandoned waifs comfort and look out for one another.

Secondly, because she hasn’t given up hope, she can think on her feet which the WW never expects. Tyranny always thinks everyone else is stupid. It is often the downfall of tyranny to underestimate the calibre of it’s detractors. The tyrant’s use of others to project vulnerability onto, and insistence on their inferiority, means that the possibility of a intelligent and crafty response is completely overlooked. Feelings of superiority can only be maintained by the perennial assumption that folk are dumb, so Tyranny gets over confident and takes it’s eye off the ball.

The third thing she does is to overcome her own susceptibility to authority. We are hard wired to do as we are told, way more than we realise. Add the policy of divide and rule and the Witch is liable to come out on top. Making one child a meal and elevating the other to a kind of kitchen co-conspiritor might well have estranged the children from each other.

A series of psychological tests called ‘the Millgram Experiments’ demonstrated how easily a figure of authority in a white coat can persuade a seemingly ordinary person (randomly picked but told they are specially selected) to administer electric shocks as punishment to a person supposedly wired up next door. Many were quite happy to deliver potentially lethal shocks to the invisible actors. Some continued even after the actors fell silent…..

Similarly the ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’, which attempted to investigate the power struggles between prisoners and their guards yielded some unexpected findings.. Professor Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford University used college students randomly assigned to either role and sat back to see what happened. The experiment had to be abandoned after six days when two ‘prisoners’ escaped..

The results showed that the students quickly embraced their assigned roles, with some guards enforcing authoritarian measures and ultimately subjecting prisoners to psychological torture, while many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the officers’ request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it.

Our instincts for survival impel us to follow the direction of authority because we assume with the weight of millenial learning that it is within our best interests to do so and yet to concede to authority at the expense of one’s own destiny is at the root of much human misery.

The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. Erich Fromm

Eventually the child must rebel and take action. In the process she must face her own shadow, her own capacity for aggression and murderous intent. She has to realise her own capacity for destruction and the responsibility this entails. She has to have the courage of her convictions, she has to understand that some decisions don’t have do-overs and that any security gained from tying oneself to powerful others has to be relinquished.

This means letting yourself be scared and not rushing in to make it better with platitudes or ‘positive thinking’, not sheltering beneath the wing of someone who seems to have the mantle of Protector, Mentor or Supposedly-in-Charge.

I recall being furious with my neighbour for calling in the Planners about a shed I’d built at the bottom of my garden. Weeks went by and I was still mad. Then I realised that her petty behaviour meant I could no longer project ‘Wise Old Woman’ onto her, which meant I was saddled with myself and the difficulty of finding such a wise figure in my own inner landscape rather than conveniently next door.

“The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the Self.” Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

This dynamic is behind so called Stockholm Syndrome, where bank staff taken hostage in a robbery soon began to identify with their captors, to the point of petitioning the President of Sweden on their behalf.

In the West we think of ourselves as great champions of the underdog, of the weak and helpless, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the protections afforded to the vulnerable have been eroded. We see people being arrested for feeding the poor. Law abiding DACA recipients face deportation despite high levels of education and significant contributions to the economy. Adults with guns seem to have more rights than kids being shot by them.

UNODC calculate that child slavery in the USA is a $32 billion a year industry with 300,000 under eighteen year olds lured into the sex trade anually. Globally there are an estimated nine million child slaves… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_world/6458377.stm

How is this possible?

In tribal societies with decentralised power children mean life, support and care in old age. As the model shifts from chiefs to kings this changes dramatically. The heirs to the crown get it into their heads to hurry the business of inheritance along. Suddenly children are the enemy and the more power and position you have the more the threat seems to exist.

Even the poor woodcutter in our story abandons his children because he fears they will be the death of him.

‘Everything is eaten, we have but one half loaf left and that is the end. The children must go…there is no other means of saving ourselves.’ Grimm’s

The annals of kingship, highly centralised power, are full of stories of kings meeting their end at the hands of their children and doing their best to prevent it. In the Norse sagas king Aum of Scandinavia kills off nine of his sons to prolong his reign. King Laius from Greek mythology hears from the oracle that his son Oedipus will be the death of him, so he abandons him on Mt Cithaeron to die. In Greek and Roman traditions Saturn eats his children one by one because he fears they will overthrow him. This may seem irrelevant to modern life except for the fact that Saturn is the ancient corollary of Yahweh whose biblical paranoia inveigles every pulpit and whose ancient books advocate the slavery of women and children.

Of course you find similar passages in the Koran, another system equally centralised on male power with rules of inheritance that make bumping off the old man an attractive proposition.

So what is the solution? Where do you go if the party of family values uses quotes from the Old Testament to justify ripping babies from their mother’s breast and caging them? There doesn’t seem to be a clear cut answer, so Gretel’s response to her own nightmare will have to do. Let love keep hope alive. Realise your betrayal. Think on your feet. Dare to embody the power of direct action.

The Emperor’s New Clothes.

What if the Emperor had been cunning enough to perceive some advantage to himself in the wiley tailors’ ruse to gain a whole bunch of gold and silk thread for nothing? What if, for his own purposes, he went along with the idea that failing to see the garments supposedly woven by them meant incompetence of office? And if so, what could that possibly be?

Rachel Maddow’s perceptive response to the Singapore summit was the question, ‘What was it for?’. The agreement between Trump and Kim contained no tangible gains for the US, not even a working definition of the term, ‘denuclearization’, much needed given that vocal promises from the North Koreans since the early 90’s have been somewhat compromised by dropping out of the non-proliferation treaty and making lots of bombs.

It looks as though Kim had it all his way. He gets to be a legitimate businessman and gets the Americans off his back for the forseeable future. Trump critics are keen to point out what an insubstantial deal this has turned out to be and are additionally shocked at the un-negotiated and impromptu gesture of cancelling planned war games for August, announced without consultation with either the South Koreans or even his own military commanders.

Can you imagine being the ranking officer concerned and receiving news about the cancellation of your entire operation from the TV? Delivered as a freebie after the agreement has already been signed.. Why would he do that? Because he liked Kim so much he wanted to give him a party favour bag after the show was over?

Having demanded complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization before any concessions are given to North Korea so loudly it even has its own acronym, CVID, Trump cancels annual wargames that have been sacrosanct in the American military heart for three generations. For nothing.

What gives?

Rachel goes on to surmise perhaps Donald is giving a gift, not to Kim but to the Chinese and Russians who have long wanted an end to the presence of American military hard ware on their front doorstep and would prefer it if they went home.

The treachery of collusion aside, commentators are quick to attack Trump’s delusional deal making, citing his bankruptcies and failed business ventures as corroboration,

‘Trump is too stupid to know that he has been played. ‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btAgFtaW4Wc

But they forget that the goal of Narcissism is not wealth or success or toadying, but the treading of a thin line between abandonment and engulfment. Early scarcity of resources in a maternal environment that alternately smothers and rejects means that way before money or public approbation, Narcissism wants to shore up vulnerability and create the groundwork for future bouts of bad behaviour by making sure there are patsies onto which his secretly precarious world can be foisted..

Trump’s freebie would seem to chime perfectly with the equally unscripted insistence that Russia be admitted into the G7 and it looks like it’s for the same reason, that he is doing Putin’s bidding. But this is predicated on the assumption that Trump is just a bumbling fool doing his best to prevent incriminating material from sousing the public domain, pee tapes being the least of his worries.

What if there was some method to his madness? Are there more common denominators to these recent events than sucking Vladimir’s dick? The fabled book of warfare, The Book of Five Rings, warns that when you are under attack the most fatal flaw is to underestimate the enemy.

What if our desire to mock and vilify in defense of instinctive fears momentarily masked over some crucial clue, some vital piece of understanding that ties up Trump’s behaviour in a way other than that of simply heeding his masters voice?

Pundits wax lyrical about how Trump has given Kim this international platform to rub shoulders with the leader of the free world with nothing substantial to show for it beyond the promise of thinking about being good. But maybe he has some private agenda, something that may be good for him even if its not good for the country. What could it be?

My father always insisted that children’s pudding bowls remain firmly on the table. You weren’t even allowed to steady the rim while you spooned what you could in silence, made all the easier for being refused the right to speak at table. Meantime the bloated sack of shit would lean back in his chair, also forbidden to children and eat his pudding with bowl balanced on his vast gut, strawberry jelly liberally sprinkled with sugar, another privilege of parenthood.

At the time it was enough to hate him. Later, in the spirit of needing to know the enemy, I had to ask what made him tick without too much frothing at the mouth so that I could become coherent in my own purpose. There is no strategy without knowing what truly motivates the psychopath who is trying to pluck you one feather at a time.

The first mistake is to assume he is stupid even though the evidence seems to be to the contrary. He seemed to delight in playing the fool, almost as if it were camouflage for some more sinister intent. The old man bought a patch of land, drew up plans for a factory with his own tiny hands on proper blueprint paper, built it himself with homemade bricks, installed plumbing, lights and workbenches but it never made anything and sat empty till bank threats forced a sale. He didn’t care. The whole town mocked his business failings but he remained implacable because his true purpose was not wealth or power or even the small joy of successfully marketing a good idea.

Who builds a factory without first deciding what it is for? Somebody with an ulterior purpose greater than money laundering or tax evasion, somebody for whom financial loss is actually capital invested in the meta project of ‘Fuck you’, one that says, ‘I want nothing more than to show you my brilliance, brilliance which defines you as shit and makes it my duty to demean.’

Tyrants have one weakness. They also, secretly, want to be vassals. Sadism and masochism go together. They come on the same plate. After all what is the bragaddocious for if not to mask over feelings of inferiority? In order to keep this from consciousness big compensatory gestures are not enough. An underclass has to be created to carry the projections adequately.

‘If there were no Jews we would have to invent them.’ Goebbles.

When Trump gives a massive un-negotiated concession to Kim in the form of USFK troop withdrawl from the world’s hottest border, he’s as happy for it to look like the impulsive antics of a buffoon to his detractors as he is for it to seem like a peace deal to his supporters. Either way, he gets to make a gesture of ‘noblesse oblige’, a unilateral utterance of sovereignty, the preserve and stamp of kings and emperor’s.

When he announces that Russia should be admitted back into the G7, this is not just an offensive diplomatic gaff, it too is the language of kingship, a sweeping decree whose content is actually secondary to the statement of divine right implicit to it.

This is about more than arrogance, greed or toadying to the Russians. He’s saying, ‘the arbitrary annexation of anyone is okay depending on who you are’, and in the process creates entire swathes of the planet that are now home to second class citizens without rights or recourse to justice.

The idea of pardoning himself does more than confess criminality by implication, which is where most criticism seems to stop. It does more than horrify sensibilities that no-one is above the law. It sets the precedent that, by the same token, no one else has recourse to the law. It does not just give him super powers, it takes away the protection from tyranny enjoyed by everyone else.

For what is a king without a dungeon?

So Kim looks like a winner and Trump is happy for you to think that. But he wins too, though not in a way you might think or want to consider. Rubbing shoulders with a man who executes his people for the high crimes of watching movies and listening to the radio does a great deal more than legitimize the human rights abuses of a vicious regime half a world away. It creates a new low for his own potentiality. It normalizes the violent repression of a new underclass within his own borders, crucial to the maintenance of that thin line between abandonment and engulfment so crucial to the narcissistic personality disorder.

Hanging out with Kim and praising him beyond the requirements of international diplomacy makes public execution by anti aircraft guns a new bench mark of normal, something that is now this side of the horizon. Citizens can be loved and crushed without contradiction.

When the Emperor swans out into the street without a stitch he does so in remembrance of the fact that his is the one office in the land that does not include competence in its job description, so it doesn’t matter whether he sees the clothes made for him by the corrupt tailors or not. Kings and emperors are not ensconced by fitness to rule, but by underlings – one group of which are prepared to deny reality in the process of subjugating another on the basis that they are ‘enemies’.

‘The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” A. Huxley.

So parading naked is worth a bit of a breeze about your privates if it serves to reveal the devotions of your subjects, establish new norms of conduct by a whole class of people who can deny reality, for what better way to crush people than to turn them into slaves without them even realizing it, who condemn the evidence of their own eyes as personal failing and unworthiness?

“They want to believe, and would only hate the argumentative expert who tried to injure the object of their faith.” Grete De Francesco “The Power of the Charlatan.”

.. all of which means that the child who shouts out, ‘the Emperor is naked!’ does not need to be dealt with…. The crowd, already given over to baser instincts and the opportunity to be one with the glorious leader’s command, will take care of him all by themselves.

Suicide.

Suicide is becoming an issue of epidemic proportions. Almost daily, we see that some public figure has unexpectedly and inexplicably killed themselves.

More British soldiers and veterans took their own lives in 2012 than died fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan over the same period. A million adults in the USA report making a suicide attempt in the last year (source; Medical News Today) an increase of 30% in a single decade.

Why this avalanche of tragic deaths? And why does it seem to haunt ‘success’? How often do you hear of a suicide, ”s/he had everything going for him/her.” ?

People tend to think of suicides as the last resort of the failed and marginalized yet all too often suicide stalks the successful, the bright, the gregarious. The suicide of Anthony Bordain seems to have evoked such public grief and shock, not simply at his loss but at the incomprehension of why such a successful, outwardly happy man with a brilliant career and a young child that he loved, a man who ‘had everything’, should do such a thing.

Conversely, Bruno Bettleheim, a psychoanalyst who survived Dachau and Buchenwald, made the observation that despite the horror of their situation, surrounded by torture, degradation and imminent death, there was rarely ever a suicide. Yet, though he survived those horrors, he too would eventually kill himself years later in his luxury apartment in Santa Monica, surrounded by art treasures.

It seems entirely incongruous.

You might look with apparent comprehension at the high suicide rates of disenfranchised indigenous people and nod knowingly at the background of poverty, prejudice, and unemployment forgetting for a moment the loss of soul incurred by those who have been robbed of their sacred hoop, their mythic connection to ancestral lands, and feel you understand.

Yet incomprehension must set back in with the further consideration that those who profited in the process seem just as prone to suicide despite their newfound wealth, the outward trappings of success, the safety of protected positions and envied lifestyles. Statistics show that suicide rates are higher in industrialized nations with greater median incomes than in developing countries with far lower GDP’s and that white people are more likely to kill themselves than less privileged people of colour.

So what the fuck is going on?

There are a number of theories. Its colloquially said that suicide is the most sincere form of self criticism and on the surface of things that it is the result of depression.

”Depression represents the major cause of suicides. To understand the leading causes of depression is essential for suicide prevention.” Eric Herbert. (Income and Median Analysis).

Yet its equally the case that suicides occur when people are on the mend from depression.

”The saddest irony is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better.” R. Cavett.

Suicide is also as much a criticism of others as it might be of oneself. I don’t want your shitty world, or to quote the disturbed teenager Smut from Peter Greenaway’s movie ‘Drowning by Numbers’, whose final line before hanging himself is..

‘The purpose of this game is to punish all those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions. It is the best game of all where the winner is also the loser and the judge’s decision is final.”

This ‘punishment’ not withstanding, it might be equally fair to say that suicide is a form of ‘retroflected rage’, anger turned inwards..

”murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.” S. Freud.

and so we are really none the wiser.

Perhaps we need to look elsewhere…

The fact that suicide is in the top three causes of death amongst adolescents and in the top five for adults, (once you have eliminated being old as a cause of death, Alzheimers, Heart disease, Strokes etc) suggests that there is something in the fabric of our culture itself that herds us like Lemmings in what Noam Chomsky calls our ‘race to the precipice’.

I would like to suggest that this epidemic of suicides has to do with what could be described as the West’s cult of Ego, our attachment to and idealization of a life unbeset by doubt, hesitation or vulnerability, a lifestyle exemplified by Tennyson’s ‘Land of the Lotos Eaters’.. where the protagonists refuse to ask questions of meaning or purpose and are in conflict with any demands placed upon them by life..

‘Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,

And utterly consumed with sharp distress,

While all things else have rest from weariness?’

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore

Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;

O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

The mariners feel that the satisfaction of their personal desires is the goal of life. They are unable to find meaning in anything outside the ego’s reference points.

‘Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,’ ibid

and so are fated, having lived in a way where everything is obvious and self congratulatory, to emulate the lotus eaters who throw themselves from the cliff tops once they reach the second half of life because they are unsupported and unreplenished by the well springs of the Unconscious.

Such an inflated consciousness…

‘Is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.” C. G. Jung

The ego says, ‘the psyche is whatever I know of it’. It cannot accept that creative inspiration, meaning and purpose, the fire of life and the desire to live under any circumstances come from depths that underpin it and so it is reduced to enduring life rather than celebrating it. It creeps through life avoiding risk and danger, eternally shoring itself up against the unknown so as to remain in confident surety.

Life is precarious. We break like eggs. But if our response to anxious fragility is to continually shore ourselves up, seeking perennial safety, refusing chaos and risk, then our chances of finding meaning will be eroded and our exposure to destructive impulses will increase.

”The creative force which seeks to manifest in the individual is walled off by increasing rigidity which seeks only safety, for exploration includes dangerous possibility.” Frances Wickes.

An internal gulf opens up, threatening to swallow life itself. The ego doubles down, starts to carve itself into stoney certainty, sets its face into a parody of confidence and narcissistic bonhomie, projects its vulnerability and begins to feel threatened by a seemingly hostile and unsustaining world.

Rigidity builds windowless walls which shut out perception of creativity, unaware of the sound of the hard hammer whose blow is death of the soul.” ibid

Hillman, in his ‘Suicide and the Soul’, points out that suicide is doing on the outside what needs to happen on the inside. Something has to die..

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death. T. S. Eliot.

But this is not a literal death. Nor even the death or a ‘getting rid’ of ego. It is the death of a delusion that we are somehow separate from a life whose purpose is limited to our own personal satisfactions. It means relinquishing the helm and listening to the still small voice way down inside that wants your service, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you….”,

When I caught myself engaged in compulsive and addictive enactments that might easily have been the end of me, suicide by accident, the worst kind that cannot even take responsibility for pulling the trigger, I had the following dream…. I was in a community hall that seemed to have all the delights of life, diversions, amusements, arcades, frivolity… but then I noticed it had no windows, felt suffocated and had to get out. A young woman tried to stop me, pushing her breasts at me to try and divert my attention but I brush straight past her and with great effort stagger out into the street.

I knew I had to go into a shop that was guarded by bouncers who looked mean but let me in. Inside was an ancient library. I felt drawn to a particular shelf that required me to go out on a limb, very narrow floorboards above a yawning stairwell. A voice shouts out that there is great danger and I have to tread most carefully not to lose my footing. Then I see a small, thin volume covered in old vellum and know I have arrived at my goal. I pull it off the shelf. Its title is, ‘ The Forbidden Beauty.’ My heart surges with aliveness and joy .

To live well you have to shuck off the seduction of feeling eternally at home and familiar. You have to go in search of forbidden fruit, that which is truly sustaining, even if you don’t know where you are headed or what the goal may be. You have to go out on a limb and do things that are unscripted. You have to try things you’ve never done before, get reinvented by discomfort and danger, meet old situations with new attitude, break with traditions that no longer truly serve, take some risks, consider that you are deeper and wider than the puddle of consciousness that thinks its the only stretch of water in the world. Then the old Zen maxim, ”If you have to kill yourself be careful not to harm your body,” will begin to make sense…

and you can have a giggle with life rather than being overwhelmed by it.

Of Cockerels and Presidents.

My ex’s response to my request for a divorce was to buy a large white cockerel which announced every coming dawn at 4am and attacked anyone who came into the yard. ‘Pat’ was thirty pounds of malevolent fury. Our four year old got gashed across his shoulder in short order and any venturing out of the backdoor now required the vigilance of counter-insurgency training to remain unbloodied.

I asked her to get rid of her pet for the sake of our son. Despite the fact that a boy in the next village had just lost an eye in a similar situation she refused, so I had to take matters into my own hands.

Pat was afraid of nothing. He had two inch spurs and the momentum of a pro footballer. Get within forty feet of him and he would come straight at you, narrowing all options to fight or flight. But the day I made a firm decision to reclaim the yard and came out the backdoor with my air rifle, he took one look and fled. He knew his time was up.

How?

Chickens are smarter than you think but there was no way this particular specimen could have known what a rifle was or that he was my intended target. What I had slung casually over a shoulder could just as easily have been a rake or a plank of wood. Yet as soon as he saw me that day, his last, he fled to the bottom of the garden faster than he’d ever run, neck craned forward and wings a flapping.

He knew.

Cause and effect are not so neatly squared away as we might like to think. What you know is invariably more than you have ever been exposed to or taught in school.

Such events cannot be explained scientifically. They seem to occur without reference to time and space, and though we cannot grasp the dynamics involved anymore than you can truly understand the concept of quantum super-positions, they happen anyway and compel us to consider that there is more in the mix than we’d like to admit.

When you see someone engaged in profoundly self destructive acts it looks just crazy from the outside, but that is because you are not in possession of all the facts and haven’t considered the possibility of an x in the equation without which events just don’t seem to make sense.

A man goes for a job interview. He really wants the position, needs the money and feels excited about his new prospects but inexplicably gets high right before the meeting and fluffs the whole thing. It doesn’t make sense, until you take up the context and consider the mischief that can be made by an autonomous complex split off from consciousness, demanding he remain infantile and dependent.

Sometimes what trips us up in our intentions is not just the regressive pathology of childhood resurfacing to keep us on an even keel, the devil that you know being safer than the angel you do not, but precisely what is best and most noble about us.

Jung comments that ”the experience of the Self is always a blow to the ego.” The reason for this is that the ego is deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche in the process of realizing its context. It had formerly assumed itself to be at the centre of things with the feeling that the totality of the psyche is a ‘nothing but’ derived from consciousness but then finds itself a mere satellite of something superordinate that will not be reduced to inconvenient material that has simply been repressed.

The Self was there first and it was out of this primordial sea that the land mass of ego emerges. This greater, sentient, encompassing awareness, wants to be realized, wants incarnation, expression, daylight. And if it doesn’t get it… it will make trouble for you.

While the ego continues in its struggles to establish agenda and hegemony, the Self thwarts its intentions past a certain point. Ego satisfaction is not the goal of life. The caterpillar has yet to fulfill itself and must give up its delicious leaves for something that looks like death if meaningful life is to continue. In the process it might well feel as though the Universe is working against you and not a little paranoia can be generated along the way. After all, something unknown is doing I don’t know what.

‘We had thought it was the outer event that had happened to us but now, watching this director’s movement, we see that it is we who happened to our selves.” Frances Wickes. p134 The Inner World of Choice.

This ‘happening to ourselves” is the process of individuation, which the ego might well experience as an attack insofar as it is compelled to acknowledge its source and get off its high horse yet without it, without submitting to the will of the Self, no amount of fulfilling ego’s ambition ever feeds us for more than a moment. Indeed, it can send us spiraling into despair.

Transformation is achieved not by incremental additions to an ever expanding ego but by a humble acknowledgment of its limited powers in respect of an inner principle which affords life meaning in direct proportion to our reliance upon it.

”With this transformation, humiliation becomes humility, guilt is replaced by a responsible attitude towards one’s own ignorance [and] the certainty of one’s own rightness gives way to vulnerability.” ibid

And so, whilst we might wonder at the strange, self-destructive antics of the world’s most powerful man and puzzle over behavior that seems to invite catastrophic sanction, impeachment, or worse..his enactments have significance above and beyond the apparent stupidity of appointing incompetent lawyers which incriminate him at every turn, beyond the foolishness of policies that inflame public opinion, beyond ill advised appointments whose corruption must splash back on his own shoes and even beyond the childlike wish to be brought to book by any adults left in the room. His own soul wants him to fail so that he can grow and to that end compels him to make all kinds of counter-intuitive gestures unconsciously designed to invite reflection and perspective., the kind that might even need a long quiet jail term to integrate.

In our own, much smaller, humdrum lives, we do the same and inadvertently invite consciousness expanding catastrophe upon ourselves with poor matches in marriage, ill considered vocations and unrealistic intentions because all these things ultimately serve to wake us up by the fall from thwarted ambition that follows.

He who persists in his folly will become wise.” W. Blake.

preferably without also becoming someone else’s dinner.