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.
