People are weird.
We’re not just self destructive. We also party to the precipice.
We amass more than we need but care more about how it’s packaged than the slice of time it’s supposed to save, as though time itself were ripe for consumption.
And then….
having worked so hard to gather more nuts than you can eat, be persuaded to part with it all at the drop of a hat and marched into a hail of gunfire on the strength of some brocaded phantom you can be sure is elsewhere at the time..
So, though we might destroy ourselves in all kinds of colorful and flamboyant ways, the silent running by which folk give away what they say they most want is stranger still…..
which is why the very different revolutions of modern times all seem to have a strange something in common. Within a generation the level playing field so dearly fought for is given back into the hands of tyranny.
Within fifteen years after the storming of the Bastille and the biggest hate fest since Nebuchadnezzer, Napoleon was crowned Emperor.
Tsar Nicholas 11 of Russia was finally toppled in 1917, yet these brave revolutionaries also struggle to bear their liberty for any longer than the French, managing to replace him with Stalin who’s Great Purge of 1934-39 made the Russians all sentimental about the good ol’ days of brutal serfdom under Bloody Nicholas.
The Chinese revolution shortly after that has the same odd twist. In 1949 political equality for all was ensconced in law along with equal rights for women. Land reallocation produced massive shared wealth among the poor and yet, by 1964, just fifteen years later, the Great leap Forward had succeeded in starving 30 million of them to death.
‘After eating the grass roots and the tree bark, they ate the earth.’ Lin Chun.
In each of these historic upheavals you see the same thing. With the gates to real equality and prosperity for all thrown open, the victorious people then turn on one another, sending their own to the guillotine or the death camp. In China this was expressed in it’s most bizarre form by the civil war between the Red Guards in 1968. You’d think the two sides had different leaders and objectives but they were both loyal to Mao and went into battle with one another both bearing his image, waving his little red book and chanting the same party slogans.
What gives?
There must be factors involved other than those we might normally consider to be a priority. Psychology 101, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, says that people’s primary motivation is to first find shelter, food, security; and only thereafter does the hairless ape need belonging, intimacy or creative expression.
Subsequent explorations, particularly out of the Existential and Jungian schools of psychology show that meaning is sometimes more important than bread and that people will readily sacrifice comfort for cause.
Some state it even more boldly..
‘If you take care of the body at the expense of the soul you will lose them both.” Weatherall
Generally the kind of cause that makes people sacrifice their primary needs is all too clear. A call to arms, the beloved in peril. But sometimes the details of even a common cause are not that obvious and folk can wind up sabotaging their own best efforts, goals achieved somehow allowed to slip between proverbial fingers.
The work of Wilfred Bion might assist us. He suggests that within any group there is invariably a gap between the stated assumptions of the group and the way it actually operates.
”Groups have aims far different from the overt task… [These aims] have the characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety. In fact I consider this the ultimate source of all group behavior.” W. Bion (p. 476).
In Bion’s view, what matters in group behavior is way more primitive than Freud’s conviction, that despite pretensions to self determination we still need powerful others to determine our fate and relieve us of the fear of being punished for daring to stand unaided. Bion says we have to go deeper, the ultimate sources of our distress are psychotic anxieties, and much of what happens in groups is as a result of defenses against them, so that they need not be consciously endured.
What could these primal anxieties be?
Dark terrors are invariably to do with what is most ancient in us, both in the early life of the individual and in the ancestral memory of the collective. The deepest of these, for both individual life and cultural roots is loss of Mother.We know full well what happens when individual children are deprived of their mothers. What of Nations? What millenial impact the shaming, the humiliation and demise of the sacred feminine, on the darker hallways of the collective psyche? What shadows will they throw?
There are layers of our collective psyche that are traumatised. Culturally we are the kids of divorced parents who aren’t allowed to see Mummy anymore, can only recall her indirectly from the time worn assumption that tomorrow must be as depleted as today, as a vague feeling of loss and emptiness. Where she used to be is Weber’s alienation, Durkheim’s ennui, Freud’s melancholia, Jung’s loss of soul. The Divine Mother who has suckled the Earth for longer than memory has been cast into the sea.
”Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o’ her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.” Francis Thompson.
Fortunately this desperate state can be mediated by several big guns in the paranoid arsenal. Firstly the feeling of lack can be palmed off onto inferior others to be purged in a colourful variety of nights of the long knives. Secondly, you can have some Glorious Other seem to embody everything you lack and then identify with them in a ‘participation mystique’, a fusing of being, to the point that your own destiny with all its trials and even your own safety are of little consequence.
It’s not simply that power or wealth may become one’s own possibility, just a dice throw of chance or opportunity away, but that even if you are trodden into the mud you can still be one with the Miraculous Other despite your empty belly and freezing feet.
so long as you have someone else to blame…
Sartre gives the example of the coach driver waiting for his feasting master in the winter sleet, their differences swept aside once he emerges, taut from his soiree, not by meat and drink but by an anti-semitic joke which gives the miserable coach driver a momentary warm glow of being in one mind with his oppressor.
To live in greater abundance brings perspective with it, asks how you have been living, breaks co-dependence, contradicts basic assumptions of scarcity rooted in a half forgotten story of violent loss.
If..
“Groups approximate to very primitive phantasies about the contents of the mother’s body, the elements of their emotional situations so closely allied to phantasies of the earliest anxieties that the group is compelled, whenever the pressure of anxiety becomes too great, to take defensive action (Bion, 1955, p. 456).”
then what do you think is going to happen when habituated oppression is suddenly lifted, when associations to the Great Mother’s body are ones of evisceration and dismemberment?
The new utopia cannot be entered into. Opportunity has to be passed up, conflict created, even if it is absurd and ridiculous…
rather than face…that Mother is gone.