The myth that there is any such thing as a negative feeling is responsible for way more than the petty tyrannies of political correctness. The corresponding puritanical injunction to ‘let go’ of the past disregards the question of whether or not it will let go of you and assumes leverage in the psyche it just doesn’t have. Such a monotheism of consciousness is bound to create alternative facts and to speak with forked tongue, clamoring at the now highly circumscribed and polished persona as if it were the holy grail itself, a form of madness touted as salvation.
How does this happen?
Well, if you take a child away from its mother it copes by regressing into a space where separation cannot reach it, splitting itself off from the traumatic event. In the process it becomes divided against the world and against itself but at least the castle keep of the soul has not been over run and still shelters the scattered remnants of the abandoned child.
What is true for the individual is true for the collective. Ontology capitulates phylogeny as they say down the Saracen’s Head during philosopher’s hour. So if you rob humanity at large of it’s connection to the Great Mother, culture as a whole will regress and begin to live the institutionalized split reality of us and them, good and evil, the chosen and the damned. Over centuries social structures become imbued with racism and prejudice culminating in shit hole countries, border walls, mass shootings and misogyny.
Pundits deplore the orange leader as an anomaly, yet he is the most logical outcome of a culture itself plagued by image and ostentation, deeply split between conservation and consumption, between democratic ideals at home and imperialistic policies abroad.
If we imagine we are evolved whilst laying waste to our environment like a three year old shitting on its own doorstep then we must expect the virtuous suppression of common sense which might forbid the victims of massacres being comforted by those who orchestrate them, rock stars amid the carnage and horror.
What’s needed is not the euphemistic pushing away of ‘letting go’ which exacerbates division, but rather a ‘letting in’, letting in of at least some of the emptiness and disenchantment which underpins our collective hungering so that for the small price of our polished veneer some sense of underlying moral solidity may be had, even if its uncomfortable, even if its painful, even if it costs us the illusion of first and only.
Perhaps if we could refrain from labeling authentic if difficult feelings as ‘negative’ and having to split ourselves off from them, we might tolerate divisive leaders a little less and regain some of the healthy reality testing which can tell con-dolence from con-artist and comfort from snake oil.
The toppling of foul leaders, like charity, has to begin at home. If we wish to be rid of the horrible spectacle then we must take its oxygen, our own feelings of supremacy and entitlement, our own projections of inferiority onto others, our own holier than thou. All this letting go is denial. We must let in, communicate, empathize, find value in the other. Ultimately this is about remembering something we already know, something which now demands we acknowledge the shared wound of the un-mothered twisting its way through the judeo christian tradition for longer than memory. We’ll never be rid of tyrants or their cohorts until we can look at them and say, ‘of course..’
