Andy White Blog

Incel, New Face of Hate.

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.

http://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/16182751.toronto-attack-suspects-incel-post-hints-at-misogyny-and-sexual-frustration/

What the hell is going on?

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.

The Need for a Victim.

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 .

Collateral Damage.

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.

The Glass Coffin.

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.

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.

Xanax Nation.

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.

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.

Addiction and Connection.

We all know what causes addiction, right?

Drugs and Alcohol.

Wrong.

Pushers and bad neighbourhoods…

Nope.

Genetic inheritance?

Wrong again.

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.

First Signs of Madness

An arrogant youth spurns the love of a nymph, Echo, and is punished by the Gods to suffer the same fate. He duly catches sight of his reflection in a pool of water one day and falls in love with it. Of course this image fails to respond to his affection. Like Echo, he pines and dies of unrequited love.

Some of the small details of this story are easily overlooked. The youth, Narcissus, does not fall in love with himself but with his image, his persona, an idealised self-construct that has little to do with his true self. He’s therefor easily fooled, not simply because he is so preoccupied with appearance but because Echo represents a human characteristic that is essential to psychic life, the capacity to listen to oneself, to hear what you are saying.

Echo is a chatterbox who has been punished by Hera, queen of the Gods, for trying to protect adulterous Zeus whilst he consorts with the other nymphs. When his jealous wife comes looking for him Echo waylays her with endless conversation. Eventually Hera uncovers the ploy and punishes Echo by silencing her voice, all except the capacity to repeat, to mirror, what others have just said.

So Narcissus’ falling in love with his reflection is a substitute for the capacity to reflect. The death of Echo represents the loss of being able to listen to himself. His capacity for an internal dialogue, essential to weighing up situations and arriving at informed decisions, is suddenly gone.

Its said that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sitting yourself down for a good chat is the beginning of mental hygiene, autonomy, consciousness itself. In 1941 both Hitler and Stalin introduced ‘muttering laws’ that forbade talking to yourself because they understood that anyone capable of self-reflection was of the greatest danger to Autocracy.

Without internal dialogue you are left with a single point of view belonging to a disneyfied persona that suddenly has no points of reference by which to chew things over. Its like trying to find yourself on a map with only one compass bearing. This means that the narcissistic character, despite his grandiosity, is easily lost and led by the nose.

Narcissus’ fate is predicted by the wise seer Tiresius who prophecies that he will die when he sees himself. Its an important detail because it helps to understand the resistance of the Narcissist to look at his own behaviour with any objectivity. Not only has he lost the capacity for reflection, the prospect of regaining it means death, the end of an inner tyranny upon which his personality rests, the shattering of a nucleus around which his sense of self is condensed.

The do or die attitude of the Narcissist can make him appear quite tough and dynamic, though it points to an inner truth, an inner threat, which accounts for his otherwise fragile reactivity and eternal doubling down. If it seems as though getting his own way is a matter of life or death that’s because it is. From the point of view of the false self with its single perspective, its one track mind, any deviation from reality-as-I-know-it is immediately an encounter with annihilation, any admission of fault, a catastrophe.

Pliny the Elder wrote that the Narcissus plant was named for its fragrance (ναρκάω narkao, “I grow numb”) not the youth. Its an instructive amplification because this refusal to deviate from his proscribed self-image or entertain any perspective other than his own has a numbing effect on the true self which is now experienced as life threatening rather than as a source of renewal.

When Echo reaches out to Narcissus he responds..

”Away, touch me not! May I die before you have power o’er me.” Ovid

Her invitation to intimacy, the prospect of vulnerability and dependence, is experienced as so destructive because it compels him from the brittle self construct upon which his life is so precariously balanced and to entertain feelings that would contradict and destroy it.

He has to misconstrue her intentions as the wish to have power over him in order to dismiss her and find a recipient, no matter how unlikely, for his own unconscious need to dominate. Such power play is not for its own sake, or to make anything great again, but so as not to face the mortal blow to pride that awareness of what is actually going on would bring. So reality has to be distorted, any number of deceptions propagated, fake news spread like manure.

He has to make out that Echo is a slut, despite the fact of her virginity specified in other versions of the story where she is enviously attacked by Pan for similar reasons, because she’s beautiful, talented and chaste.

Everything outside the preferred frame of reference, every scrap of selfhood that is not allied to the ideal, must be split off and projected onto others where they become eternal sources of threat and disruption giving rise to all kinds of paranoia and persecutory anxiety. This is why pointing to hurtful behaviour is often received with a hurt expression and any attempt to simply state your own point of view experienced as an attack.

Aspects of the narcissistic character that are not loyal to the idealised persona must be attributed to others where they are perceived as an attempt to undermine and broach the ever diminishing circle of self-awareness. Walls must be built and people expelled en masse, even if their youth, education and clean records suggest model citizenship necessary to a strong future economy.

In some versions of the story Narcissus commits suicide. Failing to listen to oneself, being unwilling to have that inner dialogue can have destructive, even fatal consequences.

Unfortunately the damage is rarely confined to oneself. Others must go down as well, a schoolyard at a time maybe but perhaps also in their incandescent millions.

Still, if you’re not listening… perhaps they’re not screaming.

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.

Fear of Life.

My grandfather died on a mountain of beans. Not planting a flag mind you. Not victorious in any way. Just dead, in bed. When they found him, the cans of beans were discovered underneath, piled high from one end of the bedstead to the other. Not, one might surmise, because he thought he might have felt a bit peckish in the night, but to ward off actual starvation, which was a bit odd considering that he had enough cash to buy both the shop he bought the beans from and the bakery next door.

My other grandfather was more fortunate. He died of falling fifteen thousand feet in the twisting, burnt out fuselage of a Lancaster bomber.

Though the circumstances of their deaths were entirely different their final moments did have something in common. Fear, though what they were afraid of was worlds apart. The young anti-aircraft gunner, trapped in his cage of glass and steel, choking and struggling to free himself as he plummeted Earthwards, knew he was about to die.

You’d think the much older man, having had a full life, lying quietly in his bed with his boots off, was blessed with a more benevolent fate. But the mountain of beans belied the hidden reality of someone loveless, disconnected from a world by which he felt abandoned and against which he’d pitifully shored himself up with a horde of staple snacks.

Our more conscious fears are of the plummeting variety. Fear of Life seems incomprehensible, even petty by comparison, yet tomorrow’s Unknown sometimes has a way of eclipsing even Death itself.

and rather depends on the fantasy of what you think tomorrow will bring.

We Westerners think of ourselves as ever so evolved but we are caught in a cultural double bind that puts a severe crimp in aliveness. We think of the pursuit of happiness as a constitutional right but entering into the feeling that happiness brings means a letting go of control few will entertain. To the extent that you are invested in image and have learned to play the power game, so must you stay in control…

”because loss of control evokes the fear of insanity.” A. Lowen.

This fear is not immediately obvious until you look at how much talk there is about ‘negative feelings’, whole service industries whose sole purpose is to help steer you away from ‘toxic emotions’. Entire psychological theories and therapies exist to facilitate the process of dominating feeling life with rational egoic constructs to help us ’emote appropriately’.

But feelings are not produced by the ego. You can’t make yourself laugh or cry. Not without looking as though you are auditioning for a part on Broadway. To the extent that you are invested in the holy grail of appearance, so must feelings and spontaneity be suppressed and secretly regarded as the enemy, there to upset the status quo, ready to ambush your pretensions and overwhelm defenses. Feelings, particularly the more vulnerable ones of dependency and need, become equated with madness.

And so, with the greatest of irony, what we fear most, more than death, is our own authenticity which really does have the power to intrude upon preferred self-constructs and shred them like confetti.

So ordinary pleasures, a hearty cackle, the relief of a good cry, the beating heart of desire, the joy that demands we let go for a moment, has to be fended off as if they were the devil himself and substituted with multi billion dollar entertainment industries that amuse and help us pass the time without making any demands or rattling the bars of our cages.

People pay for this privilege by living lives of quiet desperation

”and go to the grave with the song still in them.” H. Thoreau

though it is not greed per se that leads people to want more and more luxurious and unnecessary things, but the fear that underpins it. Making ego king casts the rest of our souls in the role of enemy at the gate. A siege mentality is the inevitable result, dominated by fear and lack and loss.

This fear permeates our culture as absence of concern for others, as pathological competitiveness, as a doubling down on whatever yesterday’s truth might have been.

‘The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but it is really fear.’ Ghandi

The extent to which our lives are dominated by the unconscious fears associated with staying in control and projecting an image of ourselves that is dissonant with the true self has been artfully demonstrated by an experiment at Yale University conducted by professor John Bargh.

He observed that minorities are often attributed with the characteristics of germs and bacteria that threaten, like unwanted feelings, to invade and destroy. He reasoned that making people feel safer about ‘germs’ could change racist attitudes and political convictions about immigration policy.

So he set up a questionnaire on political affiliation but reminded a control group about the recent H1N1 epidemic and casually asked if the participants had their shots. This control group responded unanimously by filling out their forms with a conservative bias.

Then he set similar questions to another control group, reminded them of the recent epidemic, but this time handed out hand sanitizer before they picked up their pens….

‘A simple squirt of Purell after we had raised the threat of the flu had changed their minds. It made them feel safe from the virus and (by association) from immigrants as well.” J. Bargh.

Fear governs who we vote for, even if we don’t like the guy.

In the Yale experiment ‘germs’ were symbolic of ‘infectious’ minorities. But the minorities themselves are symbolic, of ‘inferior’ and invasive feelings, ‘intrusive’ thoughts that like-wise want to be on the inside.

And so, if the world is to become a more gentle place, power withheld from tyrants, then the inner tyrant busy controlling experience and walling off a full emotional life needs a little friendly chat.

Protection from cruel overlords begins at home, begins with recognising the fear of being really alive, the loss of control over self and others such liberation brings and the fear of madness that attends daring to be our true selves.

Most of us prefer to die peacefully in our beds at a ripe old age. But if its atop a mountain of beans are we really resting contentedly? I think not. We might make a virtue of being so prepared, of looking out for number one, of being First and Only, but if its at the expense of being so alienated from authentic feelings that we spend that life wanting to ‘get away from it all’, then the plummeting version begins to look like the better choice.

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.

Bad Baby.

Children need attention. If they don’t get it they will create it. The badly behaved child has simply had to resort to extreme measures in order to elicit something from otherwise empty vessels.

Even dog trainers know this.

It’s the owner.

The ‘naughty child’ is then rewarded in his efforts with shaming, which, though it has a pitiful prognosis, still gives emotional impoverishment a nucleus around which to cobble some semblance of going-on-being.

The problem with this, the price to be paid, is that such a child must then continue to behave in a way that elicits shaming in order to confirm their identity and continue to shore up that poorly self construct.

The Rule of Intentionality says that things have a way of panning out as they are supposed to. If you married someone who runs you down, then they are fulfilling a sacred service and ought to be paid. If you wake up after a drinking binge full of remorse and self loathing then that’s the purpose of getting so drunk. Many a junkie is equally addicted to the identity of being failed and shameful, formed way before they ever laid hands on their poison and much more difficult to give up.

Fulfilling expectation is instinctual. The Psyche takes a bet that baby will be born into adequate environs. Neural pathways are wide open to any signal or stimulus that gives baby information about herself on the basic assumption of a good enough environment that she’s hardwired to expect.

So the child attributes parental failing to herself. The parent is full of distaste because baby is distasteful. So that’s what she has to be. And sometimes it’s so close that you can’t see it. In fact it..

”may go unnoticed for the simple reason that s/he cannot conceive of an alternative kind of relation of Self to Other.” Jean Liedloff.

The feeling of intrinsic shame cannot be readily endured and so the Psyche grabs hold of the next best thing to bonding which is to identify with mother instead. She accepts the booby prize of being special, more like sisters now, which both hammers a few rusty sheets to her ramshakle hovel and shields her from the shame that underpins it, now invisible but still an enduring structure in the Psyche. Whilst being special and praised for all kinds of other things that have little to do with you may get you through the day, the underlying need to confirm the shame is biding its time.

”Instinctive forces do not reason. They assume the immense weight of their experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve the individual to be stabilized according to his initial experience.” ibid

So even though the narcissistic character is full of vanity and bluster, full of the archetypal power of mummy, consumed with specialness, so is he compelled by yet a deeper force to end up in the gutter one way or another, to bungle life despite himself.

In my opinion this is why Mr Trump seemingly does everything to hasten his own demise. Alienating his own secret service, making enemies of people who have dirt on him. He’s mocked for doing stupid things. These stupid things have an agenda, the end game of which looks like self-destructiveness but they might actually serve to keep him out of hospital. In the meantime the mockery and vilification will do nicely.

Sometimes things don’t make sense until you include in the mix a need to be scorned and hated. The apparent goal of domination and control is actually the means to an end, to obtain that which serves internal security better than loyalty, philanthropy or crushing your enemies. Humiliation.

Who is a stinky baby!

And so while it seems that fate comes to him from the outside, from the woodwork, from people dishing enough dirt, enough stink; it has all been carefully if unconsciously orchestrated and for a while shame and specialness will share the stage in a masochistic self-immolation of First and Only.

While all this entertainment is going down the rest of us run the risk of forgetting that Mr. Trump is a symbol. He is an expression of the Collective Psyche, the natural product of a culture that denigrates Mothering and rejects the Divine Feminine. This cancer runs through all of us Chosen People. Are you not special? Do you not have a political system so superior that it is exported through the bomb bay doors of Magnanimous Benevolence killing other mothers and babies for their own good every day of the week?

or at least if there is profit in it?

Strangely the number of enemies killed by our generous instruction in Afghanistan these last couple of years is not as high as the number of our own soldiers committing suicide in the privacy of their barracks.

Not to mention a hundred people a day in America alone who die of opioid overdose and the fifty thousand others a year that find more creative ways of commiting suicide in the face of unbearable shame.

Why else does a person kill themselves if not because they can no longer hold up their head? Behind all the Western facade of technological and moral superiority lurks a syndrome whose ultimate purpose is dark implosion.

and its way bigger than Trump.

Shame is systemic in our culture. If we do not wish to be ruled by tyrants then getting rid of them is only the beginning.

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The Spirit of Vitriol.

Vitriol was one of the most important compounds to the Alchemists. It was distilled from an oily, green substance that formed naturally from the weathering of sulfur-bearing gravel.

After it was collected, it was heated and broken down into iron compounds and sulfuric acid. The acid was separated out by distillation. The first distillation produced a brown liquid that smelled of rotten eggs, but further distillation yielded the nearly odorless Vitriol.

The acid is severely corrosive to mother’s apron strings. Armour fares little better although it has no effect on gold. Vitriol has a tremendous thirst, it drinks life in. If a flask of Vitriol is allowed to stand open, it absorbs water vapor from the air and overflows its container. The sulfuric acid in Vitriol is the agent of transformation in many alchemical experiments, so the alchemist is bound to brim over and flood quite a bit themselves in the process.

Alchemy is useful because it’s language and symbols are a kind of waking dream that symbolise the process of individuation. The various chemical processes undertaken were metaphors, living symbols, of psychological transformation.

So its interesting to find that Vitriol was often considered the very agent of transformation itself. Vitriol was not just a corrosive substance that ate away at whatever it touched, it was also a corrosive spirit that ate away at otherwise sedimented attitudes and leaden attachments, passion that swept away intellectual ponce.

How is Vitriol the agent of transformation? Well, Vitriol is vitriolic. Vitriol tells it how it is, even if it spills over a bit and makes your lip quiver or think about stuff you’d rather not.

This is easier said than done. Synonyms for Vitriol run like a check list of dating deal-breakers… acrimonious · rancorous · bitter · caustic · mordant · acerbic · astringent · acid · acrid · trenchant · virulent · spiteful · crabbed · savage · venomous · poisonous · malicious

or is that simply the opinion of powers whose bonds and holds are being dissolved away? a badmouthing of truth you don’t want to hear..?

Moral judgments aside, what Vitriol does is to tell it how it is come hell or high water, authenticity that cuts through pretension and lays things bare, that accepts the prospect of rejection and loss, that is happy to be a bitch.

As I was researching and musing, I reflected upon a period in my early twenties in which I was vitriolic to the point of apoplexy, constantly going off on one, desperately trying to separate myself from the white extremist community I was raised in..

and while I was doing that I found an image of Vitriol which is, to the last detail, a dream image of that same period that pretty much sustained me through it. In my dream, Vitriol sang a song which began, ‘God is at my right and at my left hand side, so who shall I fear?” In the image, which I’ve seen nowhere else in thirty five years, you can see the alchemical rendering of God as the primordial pair, sun/moon on the right and left hand sides.

what the hell…?

What does it mean?

It means being able to burn with something. At the first distillation you will smell like rotten eggs. You know you stink. Lots of shit surfaces. But gradually you become clear and odorless..

or is it that you just get used to the smell?

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