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.
