Psychotherapist/writer/artist/ author of, 'Going Mad to Stay Sane', a psychology of self-destructiveness, about to come into its third edition.
Soon to be printed for the first time, 'Abundant Delicious.. the Secret and the Mystery', described by activist Satish Kumar as, ' A Tao of the Soul'. This book documents the archetypal country through which the process of individuation occurs and looks at the trials and tribulations we might expect on the way.
In the meantime.....
Narcissisim is the issue of our age.
This blog looks at how it operates, how it can damage and how we may still fruit despite it.
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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
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How is this possible?
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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.
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Even the poor woodcutter in our story abandons his children because he fears they will be the death of him.
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‘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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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‘Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,’ ibid
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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.
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Such an inflated consciousness…
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‘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
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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.
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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.
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”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.
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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.
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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
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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..
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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.
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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….”,
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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.
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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 .
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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…
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and you can have a giggle with life rather than being overwhelmed by it.
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.
Jordan Peterson’s farcical suggestion that the fact lobsters live in hierarchies makes it right for humans, need not have strayed so far across the evolutionary tree. All kinds of animals way closer to us have hierarchies. What you find is that hierarchy has to do with whether you are expected to survive or not. The more rigid the hierarchy the less there is invested in future generations.
The hunting dog of Zimbabwe allows the pups to feed first even if adults are starving and have to wait around for ages for the youngsters to catch up to the kill. The reason is that hunting dogs don’t survive too long. A life at breakneck speed taking down prey five times your size armed with a vicious assortment of horns and hooves doesn’t have more than a few seasons in it. They don’t raise many litters. So every pup has to live.
Lions live way longer. There are plenty of litters so cubs are ten a penny and get batted out of the way by the adult male who hasn’t contribution to the kill and has run no more dangers during his day than risking the odd splinter. Oh, and each other.
Hierarchies exist where the young are expendable.
Which is how the Incel movement feel, that they are expendable. Unloved and unloveable yet at the same time demanding love as a right. Living such a contradiction without feeling able to address or play any active part in it is going to tear a person apart, the only alleviation from which is to tear others apart as a prelude to suicide’s, ‘I hate you’.
A number of Incel members have committed mass murders and then killed themselves.
In 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed 6 people and injured 14 others near the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara before killing himself. He left a lengthy manifesto and YouTube videos detailing his hatred for women and his involuntary celibacy.
In 2015, 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer shot and killed 9 people and injured 8 others at the Umpqua Community College campus before killing himself. He left a manifesto at the scene, outlining his interest in other mass murders including the Isla Vista killings, anger at not having a girlfriend, and animus towards the world.
On April 12rd this year Alek Minassian, killed 10 people and injured 14 others in Toronto, Canada. Minassian was arrested soon after the attack. Shortly before the attack, Minassian had posted on Facebook that “the Incel Rebellion has already begun” and applauded Elliot Rodger, the Incel attacker at Isla Vista.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jordan Peterson explained Minassian’s rampage thus..
”Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners,” Mr. Peterson says, ”society needs to work to make sure those men are married”.
In other words, had the mean women of this world only accommodated this poor undeserving psychopath and soothed his savage brow then he would have become all cute and cuddly again. Its their fault. If only he’d been given a slave everything would have been fine. Jordan’s message is ‘men can’t be men unless they’re getting laid’.
“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”
You forced us to force you..
Anxious not to quote out of context I searched for a transcript and got luckier, Peterson’s own online addendum in which he qualified that this enforcement was not envisioned as legal, but merely social..
wot, like compelling young women into conjugal arrangements with someone they don’t want to be with let alone have sex with?
And how different is that from the last, blood-soaked, thousand years?
Whilst it is true that, ‘The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth” (African Proverb) you would not expect the arsonist to then wander into the flames himself.
In this following video of Minnasian being arrested you can see him taunting police to shoot him, reaching for and rapidly drawing what he wants you to believe is a gun and asking the cop to shoot him in the head.
Perhaps the following story will help. I was on the metro. Across the aisle was a mother and her angry three year old wanting one thing after another. Eventually the mother’s patience wore thin and she snapped, ‘I’m not your servant you know!” ”Well then, where are my servants?” demanded the imperious child. ”You haven’t got any, ” responded mother tartly.
The poor girl burst into tears, not the hot angry frustration of a moment ago but the heartfelt mourning of grief and loss. It was as though she’d run into a brick wall but actually she was crossing a painful threshold and being stripped of ancient rights, yet it was a crossing that would now allow her to experience others as her equals and find her buoyancy again, specialness traded in for a destiny of her own.
If a child stumbles at this threshold of symbol formation and has not been given the means to weather the transition from being at-the-centre-of-things to being one-amongst-many, then he can never really leave mother …but then neither can he stay without the eternal frustration and shame of not being able to join the men’s hut.
”One cannot become independent of the mother except through her, through her playing her correct role and allowing one to graduate from it upon fulfillment.” Jean Liedloff. [The Continuum Concept. Perseus books page 71]
If mother cannot be valued or is made unavailable, then women will be difficult to relate to in later life. The experience might well be one of being on the outside looking in, raging with envy and hate at those who’ve been able to relinquish mother’s skirts and found solace in one another but compulsively repeating patterns of early deprivation.
”Rarely do we give up what we drank with our mother’s milk.” Dostoevsky
When existence is predicated upon unacceptability then it becomes your default position, the toxin by which you know yourself. And so even when the hoped for situation presents itself, the moment cannot be grasped.
”Deprivation, to the degree it has been suffered in infancy will be maintained indiscriminately as part of development (assuming) it will serve to be stabilized according to initial experience.”( ibid page 48)
In the final scene from the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber’ below, Harry and Lloyd, who aren’t able to grow up because they don’t have the inner resources for it, must sabotage even their wildest eroticized encounter…
It’s not all mother’s fault. How is she to provide the emotional environment required to instill a child with confidence if her own role is demeaned and cheapened? If her divine counterpart has been chased into the sea and pelted with millstones?
The Patriarchy has pissed on its own boots. Its favorite sons are all fucked up. Crushing mother has crippled her sons. None of which means they are so stupid as not to see that the devouring of the planet, sanctioned and perpetrated by their mentors and benefactors, does not include any form of viable future for themselves. They have been betrayed by the same misogynistic fathers who colluded with and encouraged just how special they are as a substitute for actually being involved with the boy.
I once saw a boy of eight at a wedding lifting up a woman’s skirt for a look. She rounded on him and it seemed he’d learned his lesson but five minutes later he did it again. This time I caught his arm and threatened him with his father whom he immediately ran to, screaming for sweets. Papa patted his head and said, ‘you can have whatever you want…’
Archetypally, the Incel character is represented by lamed Hephaestus, God of Fire and Exploding Volcanoes from Greek mythology. As a child, he was cast out of Olympus by a rejecting Hera and had to be nursed back to health by Thetis and Eurynome who had a bit of a thing for broken gods.
Homer says that Hephaestus was the son of Zeus and Hera. However, Hesiod claims that Hephaestus was solely Hera’s child and that she gave birth to him by herself to get back at her husband, Zeus, but was so disgusted with Hephaestus’ looks and ashamed of him that she threw him out.
Hera’s rejection of Hephaestus means he can’t separate from her properly, nor give himself to another woman. You can only separate from a bond. Without the bond you only have a perilous adhesion to save you from..
‘the terror of dissolution a baby experiences when, through lack of good enough maternal care, he cannot separate out from the mother and feel that he exists in his own right.” R Ledermann (1979), The Infantile Roots of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 24: 107–126.
After nine years Hephaestus got his revenge. He made a golden throne for Hera, so beautiful that she accepted it right away. The minute she sat on it though, she was enveloped by invisible cords. The gods tried to persuade Hephaestus to free Hera, promising him a place on Olympus in return. However, he was un-remorseful and released his mother only once Dionysus got him drunk and made a deal with him.
Hephaestus relationship with his mother is one of being either held so tight you can’t move or being flung aside with contempt. Presumably, the poetic genius has fashioned something to give mother a taste of her own medicine, and to serve as a template for his future relationships with women. He ties them down but rejects intimacy, as he has been tied down and rejected. This ambiguous dynamic in the mother/infant relationship is what analyst Masud Kahn calls, ‘symbiotic omnipotence’, characterized by the denigration of third parties,
‘as potentially valuable or nourishing.” 1974 ‘On Symbiotic Omnipotence’ Journal of Analytical Psychology vol 19.
The flawed personality of the child is flung down from Olympus whilst the idealised Self is held captive, a royal prisoner, a vessel for all mother’s unfulfilled ambitions.
”The self of the child functions as a transitional object between the child’s ego and the mother. It is treated as special, idealized and at one (place) removed. Mother does not give support to the whole complexity of the child ..which leads to dissociation (and) a corresponding failure to integrate aggression. Masud Kahn ibid
The deal that Hephaestus and Dionysus make is crucial, not least of all because there are two versions of the story. A fork in the archetypal road. A dilemma for Incel. One way is that Hera will be released once Aphrodite, goddess of love and passion, is promised to Hephaestus in marriage. This is the regressed alternative. Instant gratification, sex laid on with a trowel, pining Aphrodite down as he had pinned and been pinned by mother before her.
It doesn’t work out.
For some strange reason Aphrodite doesn’t like being wedded off to an ugly, lame, exploding troll and has an affair with Ares. One day Hephaestus catches the lovers. He pins them down too, trapped in a fine-woven chain-net, calling upon the other gods to laugh at their shame forgetting that as cuckold the humiliation is his. Poseidon persuades him to free the adulterers, but Hephaestus wasn’t done. When Ares and Aphrodite’s daughter Harmonia married Cadmus, he gave her a magical necklace which would bring misfortune to her and everyone who wore it thereafter..
So Hephaestus is not above hate crime. His relationships with women are sado-masochistic and depersonalising. He splits off his misery and destructively calls it down on Aphrodite. Having ruined things with her, he uses his skills in craftsmanship to fashion handmaids made of gold to fulfill his every whim and, it is said, the first human, Pandora, held responsible for the ills of the world.
Robotic interaction is one of the defenses used by the narcissist to prevent himself from being swallowed up by a dangerous mother without having to feel anything about it all.
”He replaces bad feelings towards (specific) people in his environment by hatred and envy of the whole world.” R Ledermann, The Robot Personality in Narcissistic Disorder.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 1981 vol 26 pp329-344
Fortunately there is a second fork in the road, another version of the deal made with Dionysus. In this story, Hephaestus marries Athena goddess of Wisdom, not a natural choice for him and so you can assume it’s because Dionysus has persuaded him to it with the thought that some good may be done over and above gaining the freedom of Hera.
Dionysus has a record of striking hard yet compassionate deals. When king Midas begs him to release him from the death dealing golden touch, Dionysus agrees, but only if he bathes in the source of the river Pactolus, knowing that the humble pilgrimage alone and unaided is what’s really required, so the suggestion of Athena is not without purpose. She is goddess of Wisdom after all..
What happens is that in their first passionate embrace, Athena twists free of him in the moment of his climax so that his semen is spilled on the ground where it impregnates Gaia who gives birth to Erichthonius or Erectheus, the Earth Shaker.
How clever. Athena gets Hephaestus to unite with the Great Mother.
”If you don’t get what you need from your own mother you may need to go and get it from the Great Mother.” S Brinton Perrera
One way of crossing the threshold of symbol formation is by developing a relationship with the Unconscious, having the realization that you are not master of your own house, that your dreams mean something personal, that you have an obligation to bring something forth from yourself even if you don’t know what it is.
Hephaestus learns to wonder. He peers down into his own earthy depths and makes the transition from the fascination of narcissistic self absorption to a fascination with the Unconscious, the Great Mother. He learns about Otherness via the earth shaking encounter with the inner Other, who is both strange and yet familiar like a transitional object that is both me and not-me.
And so, repulsive as he is, there is hope for Hephaestus. He might face his early wounds and stop letting mother off the hook by assuming all women are like her. He might recognize that the Patriarchy views him as so much cannon fodder. He might then be able to place his undifferentiated and murderous hate into some context so that it need not run his life.
And he might develop some kind of inner dialogue between I and me, the capacity for reflection that would put some ground beneath his feet and enough feeling of worth into the world to draw back from burning it down.
You hear a lot in some circles about ‘quietening the monkey chatter of the mind’, entreaties to ‘kill the ego’, and ‘let go’. It’s enough to make you puke. As if killing anything within were desirable, let alone possible. And as for letting go, what if It will not let go of you? It seems that we turn on ourselves, as well as others, in some weird and wonderful ways.
Mostly when people talk about ego what they’re really describing is a rigid persona, over identification with one shining corner of consciousness to the exclusion of its dark sibling. It doesn’t want killing, just adding too so that some kind of conversation can get off the ground.
A healthy core of ego, one which can withstand the storms of spiritual awakening, does so having accepted and found value in this shadow self, the self you do not want to be, screeching at you from the treetops in defiance.
So quietening the monkey chatter of the mind has to become a more amiable sharing of the jungle with them. Trying to quieten monkeys can only give rise to trouble. They don’t take kindly to it. And they’ll steal your sandwiches. Its better to skirt around them. The monkey quelling variety of spirituality is subtly rooted in the suppression of some aspect of oneself, a form of self victimization, which begins to drive a wedge into the psyche, creating all kinds of splits.
Perhaps anxiety itself is the subliminal experience of being weakened in this way and therefor easy prey to complexes, internalized parental attitudes and other people’s opinions, energy clogged and swampy, direction and bearing lost..
With the advent of rulers that govern more than they can ride around in a day, people suddenly become subjects but so too do they become objects in so far as such leadership redefines your rights..
which are now zero.
In fact you may not make it out through the day. Though you do have a hotline to the Gods via the divinely inspired leader whose capacity to run more than he can see must make him blessed and one with the Gods. So perhaps that squares things up a bit. Wherever you find divinely appointed leaders so too will you find a people divided between basking in His reflected glory on the one hand…
and the lived reality of being a Plaything without any rights on the other. One interpretation of Cinderella suggests that the Prince was ‘trying on’ the ‘fur slipper’ (vagina) of the maidens in the kingdom, as a ‘Droit du seigneur‘ right of sexual possession of his subjects.
he is a god that can grab your pussy.
The split between Ugly Sister and Ash Maiden, bought about by kingship identified with divine powers, suggests that where there are those above the law so too must you find those deprived of all rights.
In a Chinese version of Cinderella, one of four hundred variants, the protagonist is Ye Xian, who befriends a fish, the reincarnation of her mother. Her stepmother and sister kill the fish, but Ye Xian saves the bones which are magic and they help her dress appropriately for the New Year Festival. Her stepfamily recognizes her at the festival and want to evict her, causing her to flee and accidentally lose her slipper….
Today in China, the story of Cinderella is being acted out in the proposed and much vaunted Social Credit System, due out in 2020, which will score every citizen according to a set of strongly normative ideals. You can lose points by having a Facebook friend with a low score…, because you posted something that makes you ‘untrustworthy’, and so now you don’t have a bank account or internet..
but the truly sinister part of this dystopian masterplan is the language used by officials to explain why it is needed.. According to CBS the best translation is, ‘to purify society’.
And they mean it. Foremost in measures taken against those who don’t quite make the cut are travel restrictions akin to the pass laws of Apartheid South Africa. 11 million are anticipated to be banned from air travel, four million from trains. 7 million have been ranked, ‘dishonest’, folk the Party do not like. Not criminals with a conviction, just blacklisted. The mobile phones of those blacklisted have messages from the authorities warning incoming callers…
‘The person you are calling is ‘dishonest’.
You should be warned. Talking to them might make you dishonest too. The narcissist needs enemies he can despise, both at home and abroad, to take on the visceral projections of his own inferior aspects. The man who would be king inflated with God’s Will is therefor compelled to create an Underclass despite professed humanitarian aspirations. His deeper and more urgent need is to humiliate and debase in order that the loser in the room be someone else.
who shall not go to the ball.
The Social Credit System will gradually disenfranchise the rights of minority groups, creative types, anyone who deviates from the statistical norm. Where you can live will be restricted. Whether you can buy your own place or have your own business will no longer be a matter of raising the cash. You may simply lack permission to make a living.
for the crime of not being a party member.
Just for fun, before too much comfort floods in from the thought ‘thank fuck I don’t live in China’, the same need for scapegoats exists wherever there is idealized central power, it’s just that they haven’t got around to placing a numerical value on prejudice quite yet.
Give it time.
A nascent Underclass has just made its appearance in America with the new policy of indefinite detention for the children of illegal immigrants. Minors without rights. So now bullies have private playgrounds to cruise with ready made and vulnerable inmates, pre-traumatized for their ease and comfort .
I was once at the vanguard of Empire, one of its sacrificial sons. I could strip a sub-machine gun when I was fourteen. I went to a white only para-military boarding school with grenade screens on the windows and rifle drill after classes. By the time I was eighteen I had trained with special forces, enlisted in an elite commando unit and went to war with my dark brother, little realizing that our task was not to emerge one triumphant over the other but for both our life’s blood to be spread out on the battle-field.
Such insights can take a little prompting.
We had been dropped behind enemy lines, into a terrorist base camp. There was a brief but intense battle. Afterwards we swept across the camp looking for weapons, documents and survivors. The sweep line crossed a clearing and on the far side I saw the broken body of a man.
I approached him cautiously. Multiple wounds. Large pool of blood. Twisted limbs. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me. He was alive. He stared at me impassively and without fear. His eyes bored into me. I made a quick check for weapons to distract myself from his gaze but he was unarmed. He was however desperately wounded. I stood and stared at him. He stared back. His eyes ripped into me. Not a word was spoken.
Strange thoughts forced their way into my head. This is a man in his own backyard. Someone’s son. Someone’s sweetheart. What am I doing? And in the name of what? Something in my chest started to splinter and then suddenly snapped. I wasn’t fighting for freedom and ‘our way of life’ at all, though it had been easy to sell that to me because I’d wanted nothing more than to fulfill family expectations and live up to that heroic ideal. In fact I was a hired goon of Multinational Annonymous enforcing corporate takeovers that were actually just robbery of vast tracks of land and the enslavement of everyone upon them.
And far from returning heroic, soaking the earth with as much blood as could be afforded seemed to be the order of the day, the gorier the better. The task was not to kill the enemy but to die for your country, sacrificial appeasement to unnamed Gods for the hubris of Greed, taking land just because you can. I looked down at the broken man before me. It was just a roll of the dice which one of us lay ridden with bullets and the other still standing. We were like Isaac and Ishmael, sons of Abraham, locked in enmity engendered by a Father who would be a King chosen by God, quietly sat in his club nursing a brandy with some chums.
I called a medic, radioed for a chopper and began to patch my dark brother’s wounds. His eyes never left my face. As I bound one wound after another I noticed a ring on his finger. I took it. He said nothing, offered no resistance, just continued staring at me. I patched another wound then gave him the ring back. Suddenly ashamed. When I had finished I picked him up and carried him to a clearing in the bush where a chopper was waiting. As I slid him onto the helicopter floor he pressed the ring back into my hand and said, ‘Datenda Nkosi’. ‘Thanks boss’. I never went into battle again.
That night I dreamed I was fighting my dark brother. Back and forward we went. Eventually I pushed him away. ‘’Don’t you understand why we are fighting?’’ I gasped. ‘’Look at all this stuff you’ve got!’’ The room was spacious and immaculate. Expensive carpets, period furniture and portraits by the masters. ‘’Mine?’’ he puzzled, ‘’I thought it was yours.’’
When there’s is not enough to go around we defend ourselves from the despair of it all by imagining that if we are not getting the marrow of life then somebody else must be. This allows us to remain dynamic whilst feeling robbed. It’s a bad enough bind between ordinary brothers, but when those brothers are Abraham’s Children, Isaac and Ishmael, patriarchs of Judeo-Christianity and Islam respectively, a sibling scuffle can assume global proportions.
The problem created for Isaac and Ishmael, is that Abraham’s having such a special and exclusive relationship with God, combines worldly power and Divine will, bringing mixed consequences to the people and, as we’ll see, definite problems for his sons.
”This was not simply a quantative extension of a ranking system, it was a truly qualitative change by which society had entered a new realm.” P V Kirch
Superficially, kings meant centralised power, more rigid hierarchies, increased divisions of labour and more highly organised economies. But the most important difference, the most impactful on their subjects, was a shift in the value of human life, the rules about who you can kill without calling it murder…and how the gods are to be appeased by such rank inflation.
so you’ll be pleased to know that Kings are only recent inventions.
”The way of life we now take for granted and on the foundations of which we have built civilizations, occupies but one percent of the time of the big-brain’s preoccupation.” R. Ardrey.
We tend to think of kings as something that belongs to history and by which we are no longer affected. In fact it’s the other way around. The institution is very recent and pervades the very viscera of modern life.
Far from being ousted by revolutions or the democratic aspirations of suitably frightened subjects, kings adapted as only the very youthful can. They went underground, as our serf like devotions to the rich and famous, as the farce of rule by deep state oligarchs, as the proliferation of corruption and being above the law whose daily tabloid shenanigins, violent exploits and eternal wars are just the kind of court intrigue you’d expect from period drama.
Not only is the CEO style king a political leader, he is also the high priest, an incarnation of State-Your-Prefered-Deity-Here. You might imagine this to be some amusing footnote of history, a witty anecdote from The Golden Bough and yet its widely accepted by considerable swathes of people in our time that might has right, that the powerful are ordained by and represent God. In everyday life this trickles down and manifests in the wider populace as the feeling that, by virtue of your allegiance, you too are special and/or entitled to be exempt and above the law.
‘I like to be offensive”, said a Charlottesville supremacist. After all, what is the point of being above the law if you don’t demonstrate it once in a while? In fact what other way is there to make the point?
The archives of Ethography are rich in examples of how animals of all kinds obey a natural law which distinguishes between neighbour and stranger. This is so that the aggression necessary for survival within a species does not spill over into communal violence. Snakes won’t use their fangs when they fight. The anxiety of the young male baboon to join a new troop is not just for acceptance but for protection. Herring gulls will erupt into a frenzy of squawking and tear up great lumps of grass when anger boils over, without ever resorting to their rapier sharp beaks.
People are the same..
”All known societies make a distinction between murder, the killing of member’s of one’s own group – and the killing of outsiders.” G. Gorer.
In other words the Principle of Relatedness is more fundamental in its distinction of friend from foe than in the inevitability of any violent outcome. Latent violence is there, but it’s subject to the natural law that distinguishes friend from foe. Contact with those who fall outside this protection can be made safer by rituals of politeness, exchange, intermarriage and stylised etiquette..
We shake hands, give gifts, let you have the seat furthest from the lavvy…
For folk who have been chosen by God and doing His Will, this natural law works against the majority because the king is removed from the community by a host of taboos which means that everybody, subjects and strangers alike, are now Other, unprotected by the rule which says that even an angry wolf will instinctively muzzle his bite if a pup merely shows him its belly.
No-one is safe. And the sons least of all.
In 19th C Buganda, not saying thankyou properly, with just the right amount of dust poured on your head, could get you killed. Oh, and also if you were vaguely related, or caused his Maj’ to touch the ground..or if you were unlucky enough to see him eating…. or caught his eye…
and so life is suddenly very precarious…
The advent of King-ship spills contained aggression into explosive violence. Not just between the king and anybody that looks at him funny but between the subjects themselves who are now also objects just a shade higher in worth than a non-believer and scrabbling to secure their positions.
If just deserts are your thing it doesn’t end well for the king. He is inflated and so must die. Tradition has it that he comes to a very bad end. In Dahomey, if he’s lucky, he just gets murdered for the crown. If he’s not so lucky he has to be chopped up in bits, sometimes having to do the job himself, while he can, before being ritually consumed by the next incumbent.
Sometimes the king’s violent demise is ritualised at the end of fixed terms. Scandanavian kings ruled for twelve years after which they were put to death or a substitute found to die in their place, for just the right kind of sacrifice might appease the gods… sacrifices in their ones and twos all decked out in costumed finery, but then… maybe it would cover all the angles if they were also made in their uniformed millions.
King Aun of Sweden (C6th B.C.) decided he didn’t fancy ritual dismemberment and prayed to Odin for a way out. Odin replied that he could live for as long as he sacrificed a son every twelve years. This he did, sending nine sons to their deaths. The Swedes prevented him from killing the last and tenth, so Aum died and was buried at Upsala.
On the other side of the World from Upsala the kings of Cambodia and Jambi would ritually sacrifice sons in their place, neatly buying time and eliminating the competition in the same breath, for who better qualified to serve as a substitute than one endowed with the very same qualities of potential kinglyness that make him a deadly threat? And what better appeasement to the gods for all the heinous greed than the blood of your own offspring?
Rather than repair his relationship with Artemis whose deer he killed, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order to secure a different agenda than the goddess intended…
and went to war.
Violence is going to erupt in any society where the instinctive rules governing whether killing is murder have been eroded by the king’s inflation to the point where everyone is alien and excluded from the circle of compassion, a breach of belonging that can only be jammed closed with appropriate sacrifices. When citizens are unprotected by natural law, when they can be disposed of with impunity, they soon begin to harbour the wish to become a god/king themselves., domestic tyrants, small time bullies, lunch money bandidos of sacrificial subgroups made less than citizen, whilst war drums beat for the cleansing blood of the Nation’s sons.
A poor tailor becomes lost in the forest. As night falls, he sees a light shining and follows it to a lone hut. An old man lives there and after the tailor begs for shelter, allows him to stay for the night. In the morning, the tailor awakes to a mighty commotion. Outside a terrible fight is going on between a great stag and an even larger bull. Eventually, with the greatest effort and despite his wounds, the stag wins. Quite unexpectedly, it then bounds up to our hero and carries him off in its antlers to arrive, finally, at a Wall of Stone.
The Stag pushes him against a door in the Wall of Stone, which grinds open. Inside the tailor is told to stand on a large round rock. He does so and it sinks down into a Great Hall, where a voice directs him to look into a glass chest. Inside is a beautiful maiden, deeply sleep. She wakes and asks him to open the chest.
So he did.
The maiden then tells him her story: She was the daughter of a rich Count. After the death of her parents she had been raised in the forest by her brother. One day, a traveler stayed over and used magic to get to her in the night, asking her to marry him. She was outraged at his intrusion and rejected his proposal. In revenge the magician then turned her brother into the stag and imprisoned her in a glass coffin, enchanting all the lands around them.
When the tailor and the maiden emerge from the enchanted hall they find that the stag had been transformed back into her brother. The bull/magician is dead and the curse entirely lifted.
Hooray.
The tailor is successful not out of heroic daring-do or manly slaughtering of dragons, but by three simple things, letting himself be lost, being able to ask for help and doing as he is told by the Stag.
Getting lost is not much fun. People generally pride themselves on knowing their own heading. Questioning stuff that used to be set in stone seems at best like foolishness and at worst like madness. Yet many a story begins with the confusion of not knowing how to proceed, with the loss of a value system that no longer serves, a sense of self that no longer fits, tedium with the known yet un-nourishing. Sometimes getting lost can be in the tangible form of an addiction, or a relationship that is more rut than track. Perhaps some blow of fate that deprives us of what we know. Sometimes getting lost is the loss of youth, initiation into the second half of life.
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Dante.
Being lost has a humbling effect on the personality. It strips you of arrogant presumption, makes you ask for help, feels gratitude in the place of entitlement, feels comforted by the meanest favour. When you are lost you let yourself be little. You proceed with caution, excruciatingly aware of vulnerability, dependence on others and the limits of your own abilities.
The tailor does not confront the Bull himself. It is defeated on his behalf, as part of a larger plan, with events then unfolding around him in a blur. He stumbles to his salvation in a manner that is decidedly unheroic. In fact he’s entirely bewildered. All he wanted was a quiet night’s kip and suddenly Great Beasts are tearing the garden up. Then one of them whisks you off in antlers set to steak knife, and buries you in stone with a set of instructions. Its all a bit much.
Without realizing it the tailor has set up the preconditions for a redeeming of himself that he scarcely knows he needs. It seems that he is just being swept along but he has evoked these events by his attitude. The person convinced by their own sufficiency would never allow themselves to be lost or admit it even if they were. The tailor has just the right mix of humility in knowing that he’s basically an ordinary bloke and just the right amount of courage to go sufficiently off the beaten path and lose his way.
Quests involve getting lost. Its not just a distinct possibility or even a rum chance. Its a requirement, like papers you’d hand over at a border check point to certify that you had no idea which land you were exiting, where you are headed or the name of the place. Or what you’ve done with your passport.
The reason is that the inner world is way bigger than anyone ever imagines. You think you’re just going to have a look around in the basement and find that, first off, it has no walls and then, that far from being a place of relics, it is full of life. You’re bound to wander off. And may not be back for tea.
Begging to be looked after by the Old-Man-of-the-Forest, suggests a propitious attitude that’s well advised. Those that live in the forest are generally also part of its dangers. In fact, does it not turn out that this is the very cottage once visited by an evil traveler who did away with the previous occupants?
The evil traveler is that regressive streak in us all which clings to omnipotence and magically getting whatever you want or think you deserve. He reckons he has the right to invade the Countess’ privacy and can’t contain his own petty feelings of vengeance when she asserts her own destiny. He is consumed with envy at her autonomy and narcissistically attacks that which he cannot control or dominate.
Children take in a great deal that doesn’t belong to them. We internalize the parent who seduces and uses the child to meet their own needs as well as the parent who wants us to grow. Kids already have a tendency to take on board responsibility for parental ills and failings let alone the pressure to fulfill expectations that have nothing to do with them.
This is especially true when either parent is unfulfilled in their own ambition and needs the child to sing their song for them rather than finding their own voice, imprisoning the child with expectations that stifle autonomy and so despite being special cannot grow.
I recall being given a guitar out of the blue by my mother. It was expensive, a fine gift, only, I had never expressed any interest in learning to play whatsoever. I dutifully tried but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it because my interests lay elsewhere. None of which stopped me having to shamefully confess that I had failed in my efforts. She traded the guitar in for an accordion which I also failed to play. I was clearly a disappointment and felt myself to be so for some time after. My more humble harmonica, which I did love and did want to play, became a source of embarrassment, a symbol of failure, soon to be left lying around and lost.
Parental co-dependence with their kids, what analyst Masud Kahn calls ‘symbiotic omnipotence,’ sometimes looks like a really special bond, sometimes distant and uninvolved or strangely switching between the two. The child is not so much a person as they are ambiguous receptacles for expectation and as such, more like museum exhibits or specimens in glass jars rather than sentient beings with destinies of their own. Yet, still special enough to want to pickle, a garnish to parental ‘magic’.
Archetypally, the wandering traveler is the dark aspect of Odin who, a thousand years earlier, demonstrated his tendency for using children to his own ends by allowing his son Sigmund to die for a crime he committed unknowingly and then by punishing his daughter, Brunhilde and putting her into a similar deep sleep for defying him and wanting to help her brother. If this were a Greek myth rather than a Norse one, he would be Saturn, devourer of his children.
The stag represents that aspect of the child’s soul that needs to sharpen its antlers on adversity, waiting for an auspicious moment to confront the two horned dilemma of being so special on the one hand but like a specimen in a jar on the other. Cervus fugitivus, the fugitive stag, is soul as spirit animal or guide, evoked by the sudden shock at the strange vastness of the forest. He represents..
”the bush soul, a ‘doctor’ animal, like the Celtic Kerrunos who presides over death, rebirth and the urge to individuate”. M L von Franz.
It’s in the nature of the fugitive stag to burst from the bushes, to protect its own from the entropy of being caught on the bulls horns, to be forever in dilemma, a life style of procrastination and the provisional life. We resist it because it’s noisy, disruptive and a bit scary. You may know from experience what happens if you try and ignore it, but perhaps also what can happen if you allow the white knuckle ride of being scooped up in its antlers.
My analyst Chuck Schwarz once said that 90% of therapeutic work is done by heeding the Stag, picking up the phone and making that first appointment, whether its because a person is lost in the forest, awoken by the commotion in the garden, or being carried pellmell to the Wall of Stone. After that phone call is made, he told me, the soul has gotten involved. When people arrive for their first session they already feel much better.
How you think about the Stag and his Sister will depend on your attitude to the unconscious. One way of looking at them is as though they were parts of you and so its all about you which eventually gets boring. Another way is that the Stag shares the forest of the Psyche with you and comes to aid when, like the tailor, we are made ready by getting lost, asking for help and doing as prompted by the inner voice.
The story takes the alchemical perspective that we are both redeemer and redeemed, which got them into quiet some trouble with the church who thought such a belief was tantamount to playing God, yet we can see that nothing could be further from the truth. The tailor’s part is a humble one. He frees the sister/soul from her imprisonment in matter but only at the behest and careful instructions of the stag. He is crucial to her deliverance but only by agreeing to be party to events rather than central to them.
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State sponsored sedation has flowered. Xanax, a freely available prescription drug, has, over thirty years, gradually climbed to the top spot drug-of-choice in America. In fact the rate of escalation is scary. Treatment faculty admissions multiplied tenfold in the decade between 2003 and 2013. Emergency room visits for non-medical use rose fourfold during the same period.
Xanax operates very much like Aldous Huxley’s ‘Soma’ in Brave New World. Everything that’s bothering you leaves the room. It is not replaced by anything else that might challenge or demand or impel. Anxiety is a distant memory. You don’t need anything or anybody. All yearning is channeled into going-on-holiday which can begin to feel like religious Communion..
“The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, “I drink to my annihilation,” twelve times quaffed.” Huxley. ‘Brave New World’
Of course it would be quite unthinkable, and therefor impossible, that inspired leadership might sit about actually discussing the means to sedate great swathes of their own population, yet every politician who ever clung to power knows that the greatest threat to their security comes from popular disaffection and what better way of dealing with torch bearers other than to send them on holiday? You have neither the messiness of police brutality nor the expense of incarceration.
”The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous.” ibid
Pfizer have been kind enough to offer Xanax wannabees a special discount card that lets you have a month’s supply for just four dollars….on the understanding that once dependency has kicked in and you need to treble the dose, the burden of a thirtyfold mark up may well then fall back upon your withering shoulders. The card offer can be legally rescinded at any time. Just as soon as your life begins to revolve around it.
Shame about the potential seizures, convulsions and suicidal thoughts should you elect to discontinue your prescription..
Disaffected youth represent the greatest percentage of voters there have ever been, a force to be reckoned with as demonstrated recently by the death threats sent to survivors of the Parkland massacre for daring to have a problem with being shot at.
How much easier it would be if those kids just went to their trusted GPs and got a prescription, you know, to help with their anxiety? Make sure it’s more addictive than heroin and ten times the strength of Valium and within a matter of weeks the identified patient’s voice will be silenced, their preoccupation with Justice and Truth supplanted by the disorienting merry-go-round of alternately craving and not giving a shit.
Manufacturers of the drug appeal to their own authority to sell it to you, ‘Xanax original purpose was to combat the symptoms of anxiety and panic disorder’ so that’s okay, innit? They made it about the thing they are selling it for… and hey, you can tell its safe because it is not an opioid…..
It’s like saying a Grizzly is not dangerous because it’s not a Shark. The fact is that Xanax is addictive and dangerous, whether you OD on the way up, or top yourself from withdrawls on the way down, so why is it the fastest growing and most happening back room of big Pharma with 48 million prescriptions written in the USA and 16 million illegal users for 2013? How come teen dependence has trebled in recent years?(cited from Quora.)
Smack has such bad press these days. You can’t even sell it in cough syrup anymore. And so even if you’ve taken over the country that grows it and have your own soldiers guarding the poppy fields, you still have the hassle of indigenous hostiles taking pot shots at you and then there’s the aggravation of shipping it out. Anyway, everyone associates the word ‘epidemic ‘ with opioids these days, whilst Xanax is somehow still respectable as a designer drug created by scientists in white coats to rescue you from the inconvenience of Morphine..
So it must be okay. Right?
And because its okay you can get it on prescription most any place just by ticking boxes on a form and signing. Its cheap, for now, like the cut price opium the British flooded China with in the 1840’s during the eponymous Opium Wars, a time in which the British became very angry that Emperor Lin Xe-zu didn’t want his people’s soul destroyed and made him pay back the value of Opium he confiscated and publicly burned in his valiant efforts to save them. But it wasn’t the bars of silver that the British were really after any more than the press gang down the dockside alleys are after the content of your pockets.
Lin Ze-xu, calculated that in 1839 Chinese opium smokers consumed 100 million taels’ worth of the drug while the entire spending by the imperial government that year was a mere 40 million taels. He reportedly concluded, “If we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few dozen years we will find ourselves not only with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army” quoted by Chesneaux et al., p. 55)
All of which might have been very handy to any wolves in the wings and so they kept the Opium pouring in despite Chinese officials entreating Sir Henry Pottinger, Her Majesty’s dealer, to cut the problem off at its source by recommending that the British government ban the cultivation of the poppy in India. Sir Henry gave the time honoured response of any mafia boss that, as long as there remained substantial numbers of opium-addicts and corrupt customs officers in China, prohibiting the cultivation of opium in India “would merely throw the market into other hands” (cited by Ssu-Yu Teng, p. 70
It never occurs to him that he might uphold the law.
We gotta be da criminals udderwise someone else gonna be da criminal. We gots no choices.
Others could see the immorality of chemical warfare against civilians for what it was..
”This war with China . . . really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men’s minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring by the introduction of this demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority.” — Thomas Arnold to W. W. Hull, March 18, 1840.
So drugging nations is not a new thing as such, but drugging your own? That’s new. And if it’s so distasteful to witness the systematic crushing of a nation for gain half a world away, so distant at the time that naval dispatches referred to China as ‘that singular and hitherto almost unknown country’, what then, when such sin of greatest possible magnitude is unfolding on your own block? When there is quiet but systematic encouragement to absent oneself from issues that you can no longer feel and no longer matter. Or would that just be too horrific to contemplate?
Xanax, coming to a street corner near you.
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Some fascinating research has come out that shows pretty conclusively that drug addiction, which killed nearly a hundred thousand people in the USA alone in 2016, a year on year increase of over ten percent, is caused by none of the above.
So what could it be?
In the mid 20th C most of the experimentation into addiction and the conclusions drawn, which provided the popular model we have as to its causes, was done on rats in cages. They were given the option of regular clean water or water laced with heroin or cocaine. Without fail the rats took to the drugged water and duly expired, all of which seemed to demonstrate how helpless Ratus Ratus becomes in the face of temptation..
and by association, you and me.
Psychologist Bruce Alexander was unconvinced. He reflected on the number of folks in hospital on high grade diamorphine, the kind of painkiller used in hip replacements, used for weeks or even months at a time, that did not result in addiction. He also looked at heroin use by Vietnam soldiers, an estimated 20% of those deployed, and found that there was a staggering 95% spontaneous recovery rate once they returned stateside.
So what was the difference between the rats and the soldiers/ hospital patients?
The cage.
Alexander sought to test this hypothesis and put dozens of rats into the equivalent of five star rat heaven with ample toys and food and most importantly the opposite sex, along with the traditional option of heroin water and ordinary water. He found that the rats mostly ignored the drugs. They were far too busy being with each other.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is connection. Something we are not very good at despite our sophistication. So how can we account for this loss of connection? It doesn’t seem enough to talk about class conflict or capitalist competitiveness a la Marx, the loss of shared values suggested by Durkheim or Weber’s’ ‘alienation’ – mindlessly having to obey the rules of a faceless bureaucracy.
The maddening process of having to adapt to a mad world put forward by R. D. Laing is more tempting. You cannot manage such a contradictory dance without becoming internally split and having basic security unseated, though this still begs the question of what it is about contemporary society that makes it mad in the first place.
Social isolation, alienation from the group, is fairly easy to spot. The black sheep of the family, the kid who sits alone at lunch, the hostile co-worker, the crazy driver who carves you up in traffic without thought for the consequences. Less obvious is alienation from oneself. Being alone need not necessarily constitute loneliness. Most folk positively need alone time to recharge themselves. Likewise, being in the midst of others may not reduce loneliness at all. It might even make it worse.
Deeper and more biting than social isolation is self-estrangement, the kind of internal disaffection where I no longer comes calling on Me, where the inner pathways between different aspects of ourselves have become overgrown and abandoned.
One of the principle ways this happens is when kids grow up feeling they have to fulfill certain conditions in order to get loved. They learn that they have to be a certain way to gain approval, carry parental burdens whose covert expectations bends them out of shape, bury aliveness that draws envious sanction. This has the effect of walling children off, not just from one another but from themselves. A healthy ego cannot develop because there is way too much invested in projecting an ever more entrenched and idealized self-image. This ideal gets reinforced with social approval, momma’s little helper, teacher’s pet, the leader of tomorrow.
The cost to the child is they don’t know who they are anymore, their own destiny has been hijacked, hitched to a star not their own. The need to belong subverts the need to become.
This dynamic is poignantly expressed by Danny Kay’s Tubby the Tuba, who so wants to be a part of the orchestra that he has lost faith in the sound of his own song. He’s tempted to capitulate and just oom-pah along as he is supposed to but then reminds himself in a song of what that would cost him..
”Alone am I, me and I together. If I went away from me, how unhappy I would be.. Me and I .. oh my…’
He’s helped by a wise frog who encourages him to find his own voice though he risks the fury and rejection of all the other instruments in the process.
The question is, how does this prospect of self-estrangement cast its pall over our entire culture, so much so that tens of thousands of people a year are killed by addictions created out of the need to dull its pain?
We might get the idea of an isolated incident where a child feels compelled to betray itself for the sake of belonging and take to drugs as a way out. As a young heroin addict once told me, ‘Its easier just to take on all the family pain and then numb it with drugs than it is to shuck the burden.”
But how does this happen by the million?
The answer seems to be that self-estrangement is weaved into the very fabric of what we otherwise uphold as our fine upstanding social norms.
Trigger alert!
We are collectively encouraged to consider ourselves better than others to the point that healthy patriotism can become zenophobic hatred of entire nations upon whom we then happily project all those inferior aspects of ourselves that don’t fit with the ideal we are supposed to be, the ideal that gets us loved.
Couple this with any religion that supports such splitting, making other perspectives on spiritual life not just alien and stupid but wicked and evil, and soon you have entire populations that have effectively denied and demonised aspects of their inner worlds en masse to the point where only opioids will bridge the divide and give a moment’s respite from the resulting schism, stretching like a canyon across the desert lands of our otherwise proud and uplifted hearts.
It gets worse. The divisiveness that clings to ever narrowing bands of shining selfhood must go to war with any aspect of personality not quite up to the mark, which means that ego structure is weakened to the point that connection to the higher self, to embodied soulfullness, is lost.
Spirituality that is no more than ‘vain and empty repetition’ cannot be entertained because the personality is so divided against itself, so weakened by inner conflict, that the Self, whose impact de-integrates even the healthy ego, is experienced as simply too overwhelming. This is why Jung says, ”the more the church develops the more Christ dies.’ The covert purpose of such establishment is to prevent people from having their own experience, evicting them from the Ground of Being.
Divided and bereft, longing becomes craving. The Waters of Life become Gin, the manna of heaven, a ten dollar wrap or a handful of pills, the capacity for reflection – a line on a mirror.
Is it then too simplistic to suggest that the solution to epidemic drug use has something to do with collectively becoming a little less damn holy? Becoming tolerant of weakness rather than trying to eradicate it? Allowing oneself to feel shitty without it having to mean you’re shit? Letting others have a different point of view without it negating your own? Being curious, valuing divergence, rubbing shoulders with not-me?
If you want to kick the habit, get connected. Rediscover that childhood fascination with the new and the strange. Share something of yourself with your neighbour, even if it’s just your smile. Meet the eye of the newspaper man, give your fellow earthlings a nod in the street, raise the bar of receptivity.
but above all clear back the brush that’s overgrown the paths between your inner houses, knock down some of the stoney old walls of inner divisiveness and self-judgement, or at least acknowledge their presence and name them. Ask what rules you’re living by and break a few.
You’ll live longer..
and better…
and so will those around you.
If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.
