Tag: Trump

Greedylocks and the Three Bears.

Long ago, deep in a cold forest, there lived three bears. One morning, the bears left their home to pick berries and let their porridge cool. Not long after, a cloaked figure slipped from the road. In some versions of the story this figure is a beggar; in others, a thief. Seeing the empty cottage, she tried the door. It was unlocked.

Inside, the smell of food. Without a thought she tasted the largest bowl but it was too hot to eat directly. The next was too cold and who can be bothered….. The smallest she could gulp down straight away and so she ate every last bite. Growing bolder, she tested the chairs. The first held firm. The second sagged. The third shattered beneath her weight.

Upstairs, she tried the beds. The first was hard as wood. The second was soft but stifling. The third was all there was left and so she helped herself and fell asleep.

When the bears returned, they smelled her immediately. Someone had been in their home. They found the empty bowl. The broken chair. And then, following the muddy trail upstairs, they found her sprawled across Baby Bear’s bed still wearing her shoes.

In the oldest tellings of this fairy story Goldilocks does not escape.

Some say the bears dragged her into the forest and she was never seen again. Others say she leapt from the window in terror and broke her neck on the rocks below. In a few less polite versions, the bears killed her outright for violating their home — not out of cruelty, but because in the wild, trespass means danger.

The tale ends not with happy ever after, but with a warning:

Do not enter what is not yours.
Do not take what you did not earn.
Do not assume the world is gentle simply because it looks quiet.

I once dated a woman who was very hard to please. But I was determined and did everything I could to make her happy. Nothing satisfied. Eventually, like Putin at Petrovsk, I poured all my considerable resources into one final push. I thought that if I rolled all her favourite things into one grand gesture I could finally win her heart. So, I made a list of all the things she loved: medieval architecture, summer skies, picnic baskets with green olives, Prosecco and parma ham, sunsets and country vistas. On the appointed day, I drove us out to the site of an ancient chapel atop a hill on Dartmoor in late August with a hamper full of Crisp apple strudels and Schnitzel with noodles. It was perfect.

The sun was setting. The sky was aglow with reds and pinks. The ancient chapel oozed romance and chivalry. The hamper spilled with tasty snacks. We sat down on the soft grass of the churchyard and took in the breathtaking views across golden valleys and bubbling streams. She looked out at it all with childlike wonder and exclaimed,’its beautiful…’

..’but’, and her brow darkened, her eyes narrowed and her jaw set, ‘why haven’t you bought me here before?’

Of course the ingratitude on her part and the despair on mine rode rough shod over being able to see the unutterable poverty of her inner world which nothing could satisfy. Greed is something which so snags our moral sensibilities it is difficult to see past it to the gnawing pit of ravenous hunger it is so furiously unable to fill.

Hunger becomes greed at the point when we give up on the hope of ever receiving what we need. If I cannot receive I have to take. If taking won’t fill, as it rarely does, then the good thing must be spoiled so you can’t have it either. Even if you are willing to share. The agony of greed is not only that the world must be experienced as withholding and impoverished but that good things must quickly be refused even when they are available because the person’s attention has shifted away from hope and sharing to confirmation that the world and everything in it has no value. Sense of self has become coalesced around inner poverty which then requires the emptiness to be maintained for the sake of a stable self structure. Plenty is threatening to a core identity adapted to the absence of love/nurture and so the person finds themselves in the awful bind of having to negate and dismiss what is most needed even when it is at hand.

This is tragic for the individual. It’s catastrophic when it becomes collective, when it begins to determine international policy. Allies must be denigrated, resources plundered, homes invaded, people snatched. Not only is there never enough but whatever is available must be repudiated for the sake of consistency. It is enough to make anyone want to destructively lash out .. and bigly. Greed has a deathly quality. It does not just want something for itself. It wants the good in the other to be destroyed so it doesn’t feel inferior or dependent. Greed wants to annihilate the source of good, not just acquire it.

This leads to the kind of corrosive complacency which takes no thought for consequences or tomorrow. Goldilocks doesn’t concern herself with what might happen if she remains in the home she has invaded. She’s unable to reflect on the result of either her theft of the porridge or the damage done to the chair. She just falls asleep and buries her head until she is overtaken by events.

Greed can’t use what it takes, so good things must be devalued and friends humiliated. Trump’s recent Davos speech confused Greenland with Iceland four times, so little did he care about what was so important only days or hours before. But the kicker was the astonishing denial of the role of America’s allies during WW11 and more particularly the denial of England’s 457 fallen heroes in Afghanistan. He’s not just wrong or misinformed. More importantly, it’s that contempt for others and the need to be hated by them have come to replace the unmourned loss of absent love and nurture. He needs to be controversial. He wants your outrage. Identity must be rooted in at least something and in the absence of love and respect, hate and vilification will do.

If only Trump were an anomaly. Unfortunately he is only the most recent iteration of a long standing tradition, enabled by an emotionally starved collective still telling ourselves that we are the avatars of civilisation, cramming ourselves with stuff we don’t need whilst others starve. Let’s at least not deceive ourselves. The underbelly of our vaunted sophistication is sophistry; the clever use of lies and deception. Nothing will change much until we face the honest shame of our collective responsibility in allowing such a scumbag to succeed, until we face the fact that the long line of despots and tyrants in our culture are the logical conclusion of two thousand years or more of vengeful male Gods with all the emotional intelligence and relatedness of the average tape worm.

In the original story of Goldilocks she doesn’t get tired of winning. The bears have her, not because they are violent but because her waste, destructiveness and insatiability are dangerous to all the other animals in the woods who understand that what befalls one of them becomes the fate of all.

The Rape of America.

One of the most dangerous misconceptions about Narcissism is that it is about the lack of something. Author Bruno Bettleheim uses the metaphor of ‘The Empty Fortress’, to convey this idea, that the Narcissist is just a bunch of defences surrounding a vacuum, forgetting that the fortress is empty because its contents have been projected. Shakespeare seems to concur with Bettleheim in Macbeth, Act V, Scene V.

“It (life) is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare is describing what life looks like from inside a soul that has destroyed its own moral centre. He seems to be saying that when you live as if nothing matters, the world eventually appears to mean nothing. Though this is hardly enough. After all, both Lord Duncan and the Queen lie dead…

In common parlance we speak about the Narcissist, ‘lacking empathy’, as though the problem was simply that they had something missing. Well wishers wonder if they could ‘learn’, as though what was required was simply a matter of corrective instruction.

Yet this is far from the truth and perhaps reflects the desire on behalf of said enablers to bury their heads in the sand whilst the malignant wrecking ball sweeps past their tail feathers.

In fact, the Narcissist is far from empty or beset by ‘lack’. The problem is not so much the absence of something positive, relatedness and connection, but the presence of something which regards such virtues as weakness and aberration.

The prime concern of Narcissism is to rid the fortress of unbearable feelings. It’s empty because its contents have been evacuated. The oft vaunted attributes of Narcissism, pride, arrogance, superiority, can only be had once one’s system is shot of vulnerability and human frailty. These unwanted feelings have to be projected onto some unwitting other which then brings the person into immediate conflict with his neighbour. In the special case of malignant narcissism, projection is not quite enough. Projections don’t always stick.

You might attribute your neighbour with weakness and stupidity but she is always free to disagree. Unless you actually make her feel weak and stupid. The malignant narcissist differs from his more common or garden cousin by the need to make sure that the projection sticks. It’s not enough to simply assert the other is weak and stupid,. You have to get them to agree. It’s called projective identification. I project my shit onto you and get you to claim it as your own, making you feel as though I am not merely insulting you but correctly identifying that you are indeed a piece of crap.

One of the most heinous manifestations of this is rape. Rape is not about sex, Rape is about the need to humiliate in such a way that the raped other is forced to carry and identify with the feelings of worthlessness and inferiority which so interrupt and interfere with narcissistic hauteur.

In May 2023, a New York civil jury found Trump liable in a lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse and defamation related to an incident in the mid-1990s. Because this was a civil case (a lawsuit for damages), the jury did not criminally convict him of rape though he was ordered to pay damages. Some legal commentary said the conduct involved ‘non-consensual penetration’. Trump himself confessed, in the Hollywood access tapes, to ‘pussy grabbing’… He qualified his behaviour, ‘when you are a celebrity, they let you do it.’

Even more disturbing are the multiple accusations from underage girls at the time of being raped by Trump and his best mate Jeffrey Epstein over many years, all of which Trump has done his utmost to keep concealed from the public eye, both by DOJ withholding and the various distractions of Venezuela and Greenland. It does seem rather ironic that this deflection from public scrutiny of his sexual ‘indiscretions’ should be the penetration of one sovereign nation and the threat to ‘have’ another, ‘whether they like it or not’, which of course is rapist language.

It’s not simply that the malignant narcissist does not care. Lack of empathy is the least of your worries. What is so dangerous is the ontological need to make others suffer so that he does not. The wish to make others suffer is not just sadistic. The enjoyment of the pain, exulting over the degradation of others is an existential necessity, the glue that holds the fraying threads of mental imbalance in some semblance of order.

Governance, logic, international relations, all play second fiddle to the self preservation of unloading inferiority and humiliation into others. The recent runway interview at Davos was a prime example. When told that French president Macron had declined his 1 billion dollar ‘invitation’ (protection racket) to the ‘Board of Peace’, his response was a shaming, ‘no-one wants him’. Of course, Macron’s refusal was on the back of a written invitation which he would not have been offered unless Trump wanted him. Logic and international relations simply go to the wall in the face of the urgent need to demean, rubbish and humiliate. Say whatever is needed to rid hated feelings of being unloved. Even if it makes you look stupid; those feelings too can be shed in time, as they were only hours later with his demeanment of China’s (successful) wind farm programme.

If only Trump’s pussy grabbing was confined to those he considers enemies or sufficiently unprotected to be inconsequential. Lady America herself is not safe from the ravages of malignant offloading. ‘Going in’, to maiden cities with national guards and the unaccountable and deadly violations of ICE agents, who are really extensions of Uncle Donald’s feverish paws, ensure the continued humiliation of millions so that he doesn’t have to be afflicted by his own painful feelings. Someone else can be made to feel the pain on his behalf, in their countless droves.

Why? Because hatred comes first; the target is constructed afterward. In so doing you get others carry and identify with all the loathsome emotions of worthlessness so urgently in need of disinvestment such that a polished persona based on the fragile ground of self congratulation can be maintained. The world must be shat on or incorporated, the sovereign autonomy of girls and nations violated, all so that the Emperor Baby and his minions can sleep easy at night.

Mammon’s Quiet Ledger

I asked AI to tell me a story about Mammon, the god of gain and greed. I had been wondering about his role in the recent land grab of Venezuela. It gave me this. I was amazed. I hope you are too. I’ll comment afterwards.

Mammon lived in a house with no windows.

It wasn’t that he disliked light; he simply preferred reflections. Polished floors caught the glimmer of chandeliers, mirrors doubled every flame, and gold—ah, the gold—turned even shadows into something worth possessing. Coins lined the walls like scales on a dragon, each stamped with the faces of kings who had begged Mammon for favor and cursed him in the same breath.

People said Mammon was a demon, and perhaps he was. But demons, like virtues, are often made by repetition.

Each morning Mammon opened his great ledger. Its pages were thin as skin and endless as appetite. Names appeared on their own, written by hands that were not his. Beside each name bloomed columns of numbers: debts, profits, losses, interest compounding like a slow spell.

One evening, a girl arrived at his door. No guards stopped her—there never were any. Those who came to Mammon arrived because something inside them had already unlocked the gate.

She carried nothing but a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth.

“I want to make a bargain,” she said.

Mammon gestured, and a chair shaped itself from coins. “Everyone does.”

“I don’t want gold,” she said quickly. “Or jewels. Or land.”

Mammon paused. This was unusual, not unprecedented, but unusual enough to be interesting.

“What do you want, then?” he asked.

She hesitated. “Time. For my father. He’s dying. If he had one more year, he could finish teaching me his trade. One more year and I won’t starve when he’s gone.”

Mammon turned a page in his ledger. Her father’s name was already there, the ink faint, the balance nearly zero.

“One year is expensive,” Mammon said. “What will you pay?”

The girl placed the loaf of bread on the table.

Mammon laughed, a sound like coins poured onto stone. “That wouldn’t buy a second.”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s all I have.”

Mammon studied her. No trembling greed, no wild hope of riches—only fear sharpened into resolve. He had seen emperors offer their souls with less clarity.

“Very well,” Mammon said at last. “I’ll take what you value most.”

She swallowed. “My future earnings? My labor?”

Mammon shook his head. “Too common.”

He leaned forward, eyes reflecting her face back at her. “I will take your ability to want more than enough.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“You will,” Mammon said gently. “When the year is done.”

The bargain sealed itself with a whisper. The loaf of bread turned to ash. The girl ran home, hope burning bright enough to blind her to the cost.

True to his word, Mammon adjusted the ledger. The father lived. A year passed. He taught his daughter everything he knew, and when he died, it was peacefully, with her hand in his.

The girl worked hard. She earned enough. She never went hungry.

But she never wanted more.

When others chased wealth, she stopped at sufficiency. When offered power, she declined. She gave excess away without ceremony or pride. Mammon watched as fortunes flowed around her like a river around a stone.

And for the first time in centuries, his ledger showed something strange.

A name with no growth.

Mammon found himself returning to that page often. Not in anger, but in curiosity. The numbers did not swell. They did not shrink. They simply were.

It unsettled him.

Mammon thrived on hunger—on the aching reach for more. Without it, gold was just metal. Power, just noise.

One night, Mammon closed his ledger and extinguished every light in his house of reflections. In the dark, surrounded by wealth that suddenly felt heavy and mute, he wondered—briefly, dangerously—what it might be like to be poor in desire.

…………………………….

Mammon got his first major career boost in the New Testament when Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” (Luke 16;13) He doesn’t say, “You cannot serve God and Satan,” which might make you wonder what the difference could be. The answer is that Satan is all about doing bad stuff, acts of wickedness, overt harm; whereas Mammon is a much more clandestine attitude of avarice and desire. Satan tempts people to evil deeds, whereas Mammon enslaves people with promises of security, status, and identity tied to riches.

Prior to his New Testament upgrade, Mammon was not elevated so highly in ancient times and so was far less of a problem. In early Aramaic usage, Mammon is not a deity/devil at all—just a neutral term for money or material possessions. From 500BC onwards, Jewish texts from this period often warn against trusting wealth instead of God. Mammon begins to carry a moral charge, wealth is dangerous when it becomes an object of trust or loyalty, though he is not yet personified as a demon.

In the original Greek text of the New Testament, Mamōnas is left untranslated, suggesting Mammon is more than money, it behaves more like a rival master. Scholars generally agree Jesus is portraying wealth as something that can command allegiance like a lord, yet at this stage Mammon is still not explicitly a demon but rather a spiritual power in the sense of a force which enslaves human loyalty.

By the second century Mammon has become far more substantial. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and others speak of Mammon as a false master, an idol and a demonic influence. Augustine emphasises that Mammon rules those who love riches, much as God rules those who love righteousness.

By the medieval period Mammon becomes increasingly personified. Gregory the Great (6th century) treats avarice as a ruling vice that enslaves the soul, though not a named demon as such. By the 12th century, Peter Lombard in Sentences (Book II) discusses Mammon as a dominus avaritiae (“lord of greed”) though Lombard stops short of a full biography. Then, in the work of William Langland (14th century), Mammon finally emerges as a personified power of corruption and greed, closely associated with hellish forces and moral decay, clearly operating as a diabolic power. By the 16thC, Binsfeld’s Classification of Demons. (1589) codifies medieval tradition, affording Mammon formal demonological canonization alongside the other lords of deadly sin, Lucifer, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Beelzebub, Satan and Belphegor.

Mammon’s rise to power has been meteoric. From mere ‘thing or stuff’ to Keeper of Hell’s Treasury in two millennia. Could there be a connection to the equally meteoric and contiguous emergence of what Jung calls the ‘monotheism of consciousness’?

Back in the day you might choose your sacrifices according to which God it might seem most propitious to plea for increase. Mammon is wealth itself. The question ceases to be one of evoking the God’s abundance. It becomes one of amassing God as stuff. All of which means the more you have the more righteous you must be since there is now a direct link to be made between wealth and manna.

So it really shouldn’t surprise us to see all kinds of manifestations of this dotted increasingly through the ages to match Mammon’s trajectory from Bronze Age house elf into Lord of the Seventh Sin. Just before the time Jesus was flagging up Mammon’s cosmic debut, Roman senator Marcus Crassus had invaded Parthia because….. he just needed their gold, like, really badly. Once his ass had been thoroughly whipped at the battle of Carrhae, he was executed by the Parthian’s who killed him by poured molten gold down his throat, a kind of poetic underscoring of his enthralment to Mammon.

Plutarch (Life of Crassus) states explicitly that Crassus was driven by the desire for military glory to rival Caesar’s conquests in Gaul and Pompey’s victories in the East. He was motivated by greed for Parthian wealth. Plutarch writes, in essence, that Crassus sought neither justice nor necessity, but gold and reputation.

Crassus had at least some shame, presented the campaign as a defensive and stabilizing war to protect the Roman province of Syria and to check the wiles of Parthian power. He gave it some spin. Even Hitler, 2 millennia further into Mammon’s rise, claimed to be saving the Austrian people, saying they were being denied their right to self-determination. His invasion was cast as liberation and reunification.

No more. Mammon is now out front and centre. On Air Force One, being interviewed by reporters, US Senator Lindsay Graham interrupted Trump when asked about the invasion of Venezuela by a reporter, interjecting the time honoured ‘casus belli’, ‘there are going to be Americans alive today because he (Trump) shut down a narco-terrorist state..’ but the fakery was no longer necessary, When further prompted as to the possible plight of political prisoners and human rights violations, Trump dispensed with pretence, ‘We haven’t got to that, what we want to do is fix up the oil.’

AI’s story of ‘Mammon’s Quiet Ledger’ is so poignant because it seems to get underneath the gnawing issue of human greed and reframe it in such a way that it can be healed. The girl is free of grasping compulsion because of her love for her father and her proportionate need for and valuing of his wisdom. The Principle of Relatedness saves her from succumbing to Mammon’s influence. He is left not only wondering what it might be like to be free of the hunger which wants more than it needs, but is actively feeling the concomitant loss of power and influence effected by her devotion. This is something all of us can do. Every act of kindness, every gesture of love, leaves Mammon scratching his head, reducing his power in the world and even gaining grudging respect.

Phoenix Aflame.

Love him or hate him the world is glued to Trump’s Phoenix mega church play date with his worshippers. But will this slow train wreck of a Presidency finally burst into flames in Phoenix? It seems rather likely. Somehow the intersection of plague, collective denial, magical immunity fantasies and an age old need for the dying king to sacrifice his finest to the Gods in order to prolong waning power is all too tempting for Fate to leave alone.

The part of Trump who would be king is bound by convention to propitiate the Gods with the lives of his nearest and dearest. It’s a tradition. The victims are either individually chosen, mostly by being foolish enough to get within reach, or they are culled collectively, as in the Aztec Flower Wars, whose sole purpose was the capture and sacrifice of fine specimens to please the divine powers behind the throne. Deprived of the convenience of war, this need for sacrificial victims most find some other expression.

Trump is a deeply religious man but not in the way you might normally think. His is more an identification with God, conferred by much laying on of hands, massive collective Messiah projections, and a narcissistic personality disorder the size of a large house.

It may seem entirely counter-intuitive to host an indoor chanting contest during the peak of air-borne plague, especially given his trajectory after Tulsa. It’s easy to forget that we are not dealing with rational forces here and would do well to remind ourselves that Covid does more than give an opportunity to flaunt your omnipotence. Whether this is on account of being bathed in the blood of Christ or having cleverly invented some high-tech ionization gizmo, guaranteed to kill 99.9% of corona virus or your money back, er, unless you signed a waiver, or unless you were just the unlucky statistic. It also means that you might die a martyr for your cause, which does great things for your adrenal and cortisol responses, bringing you closer to God in ways unspecified by the Good Book.

In his conquest of Central America, Cortez came across captives of the Flower wars, being kept plump for some festive occasion, and set them free. They were most put out and demanded to be sacrificed… Extreme Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe. Yet examples of martyrs offering themselves up for sacrifice abound through different times and cultures.

Perhaps part of the problem is that if life’s rewards are all deferred to some future idyll it might make folk all the keener to embrace it, not to mention the Brownie points in store for those laying down their lives for the Cause, ‘Greater love hath no man, than he who would drown in his own phlegm for his white picket fence and our way of life.’

So sometimes the excoriating ego death of genuine religious experience is acted out in an all too literal fashion, permitting you a pimped eulogy at your funeral without ever having had to change and grow.

The Aztecs also had a way you could be of service without having to be captured in battle. In the spirit of being willing to die for the economy a volunteer would be dressed up like the god Tezcatlipoca. His skin would be painted and he would wear a flower crown, a seashell breastplate, and lots of jewelry.

The man would be given four beautiful wives to do with as he pleased. He was only asked to walk through the town playing a flute and smelling flowers so that the people could honor him.

When 12 months had passed, he would walk up the stairs of a great pyramid, breaking his flutes as he climbed to the top. As an adoring crowd watched, a priest would help him lie down on a long altar made of stone. Then they’d rip his heart out of his body.

Afterward, a new Tezcatlipoca would step forward and start all over again.

We think we are so different from the Aztecs and so lose sight of the way in which the deep running currents of the collective psyche operate. What should frighten us is not that Trump is stupid or uneducated but that he operates from this archetypal layer of the psyche without the trivial garnish of ego functioning, one which might mediate the Old Testament quality of either sacred immunity or risking oneself for the sake of the glorious leader so that the path way to the Gods may be kept open.

It’s not even that he doesn’t care, he needs the martyrs and the martyrs need him. They are all having a religious experience. Unfortunately, it is at the level of ‘participation-mystique’, which is all about undifferentiated mergement, a state of being utterly un-phased by the body count. The gods must be propitiated.

The pundits criticize Trump for his selfishness. Bolton claims he makes all his decisions on the basis of personal interest. More frightening still is the thought that the wish to be above the law leaves a man at the mercy of unconscious processes wherein everyone’s rights and safety are threatened. His greed is the least of our worries. For the man who would be king, everyone else is sacrificial stock. Of course testing must be stopped. People cling to their leader in times of crisis… even if twas he that caused it.. No war time President has ever been deposed….

Giving the Devil his Due.

In the wildly phantasmagoric, ‘Essene Gospel of Peace’, an alchemical coagulatio of Gnostic wisdom and late neolithic enema rituals [great if you are handy with a calabash], there comes a bucolic moment when the Master berates his followers for going on at such great length about their suffering and how much they are tormented by Satan..

‘Satan torments you thus because you have already fasted many days and you do not pay to him his tribute. You do not feed him. You torment him with hunger.’

Psychologically,

‘You are over-identified with being good. You therefor deny, split off and project your shadow and pay for this with a good solid neurosis. The way out of this mess is by repairing the relationship with this disavowed self.’

Nietzsche echoes this a few centuries later, with added flowery bits, when he made the observation in ‘Birth of Tragedy’, that the brothers Apollo and Dionysus have become estranged from one another in our culture. We have come to worship at the altar of only one of them with our sunny dispositions and political correctness and have driven the invaluable other underground, causing a great rent in the collective psyche..

‘Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture, can save the Apollonian dream from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind.” F. Nietzsche

Any over-identification with a single story/storey, mono-anything, is going to have the effect of enervating the psyche, preventing development and generating schizoid, [indiscriminate rambling] characteristics in the personality. You begin to become unhinged and increasingly reliant on denial and projection to stay behind the picket fence of your preferred ism. Hence much of the paranoia of our age. Monochrome is a little threatened by red, yellow and blue, which it secretly wants to become.

Uncomplicated belief systems, produce split realities. If you won’t be complicated you will develop a complex instead, one that requires carefully choreographed conflicts in order to stay afloat. The cut and dried belief system in which all the questions are answered and there is no internal dissent is… well, cut and dried. It is severed from its roots with all the moisture sucked out of it. The cutting and the drying divides the self against itself, desiccates life, creating schizoid separation from self and world. In lieu of our daemonic guardians standing watch over us, they are suddenly co-opted into the kind of self care necessary to split realities. Preserving ‘our way of life’ becomes a divine mandate.

‘The transpersonal is placed in the service of defense’. D. Kalsched.

Instead of the transcendent function being used to create transitional space between self and other, the opposite happens. The psyche fractures to accommodate its denied multiplicity whilst the transcendent function is bused in to enforce social distancing and prevent the psyche from conferring with itself. I.e. reflecting. It becomes a sacred duty to hive oneself off from what is going on.

“The schizoid experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with’ others or ‘at home in’ the world.” R.D. Laing.

We pay dearly for any belief in our own exclusive rightness, in ‘first and only’. Despite convictions of privilege, rectitude and self-congratulation, the price is internal division and disconnection from others which is why spending any time with a true believer will always leave your head spinning.

At the schizoid end of narcissism the problem is not simply lack of empathy for others, but more an actual denial of others. Others become statistics and collateral damage. Bad numbers. I’m put in mind of a patient who left, never to return, with the words, ‘I just can’t see you as a human being’.

”To feel potential and share with a beloved other is what the schizoid cannot do because their nascent longings were traumatically disappointed as children.’ Kalsched

Its a bit like saying that the way we collectively address when-Mother-is-missing, is to split off anxiety and bolster sudden fragility with life giving convictions and certitudes, whilst having to dumb down life’s complexities and infinite variety. This then drives the devil in us crazy… and vengeful, wanting his pound of flesh for the ongoing delusion that you are captain of your ship, and that there are no raptors aboard. Or at least if there are raptors, then its quite safe. And if its not safe then its not my responsibility. I wasn’t there. I don’t know nuffing about any raptors. I never met them.

The scary thing about Trump is that he really is a man of the people. Its not just that a hundred million people think this clearly ungodly man is blessed by Jesus. Its that he really does epitomize many of the values we all hold, including the right not to have to grow into long pants or go through life with any critical reflection.

‘‘Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his
beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all
that.” C G Jung CW9.

What else should we expect of a collective which has lost its mother?

The collective loss of the divine feminine produces a cultural response no different to that of an individual toddler who is suddenly forced by neglect or bereavement to adopt a position of absolute certainty in life in order to compensate for chaotic feelings of loss. All Mono’s are likewise full of full of passionate intensity and always know what’s going on. The widespread belief that we somehow cannot help but evolve seems to be undercut by the fact that whatever ism we belong to, it shares with all the others the same blinkered prejudice of an exclusive and ‘right’ way of looking at things consistent with schizoid defense structures.

Mr Trump’s recent assertion that intravenous bleach, a known suicide method, might be the miracle cure for Coronavirus, seems to demonstrate the addling effect, the split realities and the psychic enervation which results from first and only, from failing to give the Devil his due.

The Secret Masochist.


An arrogant young man gets on a train and sits opposite a little old lady. He begins to regal the carriage with his opinions, takes up everyone’s personal space, endless showing off. He gets off at the next stop but as the doors close the old lady opens a window and shouts out, ‘you left something behind!”. By now he’s running next to the carriage with his arms out, perplexity written across his face. ‘what is it, what did I leave?”

” A very poor impression…” she retorts, just as he runs out of platform.

There is really no such thing as a sadist or a masochist. Search and you can’t find one. Sado-masochism is a polarized continuum, like manic-depression, a kind of sliding between extreme states in order to know who you are, necessitated by narcissistic fragility and emptiness.

Narcissists tend to hide their unconscious masochism behind a front of cruel superiority. Sometimes this masochism has covert expression. Like toadying to Russians, or the ‘look what they done to us’ behind MAGA. Sometimes its done inadvertently by creating the conditions for perpetual investigation; and sometimes it just pops right out like the compulsive laying claim to government shut down. ‘I will take the blame, give me the mantle.”

The Sado-masochistic enactment unfolding on Pennsylvania avenue seems to be getting to the short strokes. Aided by the prophylactic restraint of seventeen strapping investigations…

Donald is finally going to cum.

Former US federal prosecutor Paul Butler recently described Trump as being ‘double teamed’ by the Mueller probe and the SDNY investigations. This image, now indelibly lodged in imagination, brought not a single blush to the cheeks of assembled MSNBC pundits whose blithe acceptance of such a metaphor suggests something a lot stranger than Russian collusion or Fraud is going on in the White House…

the unfolding sado-masochistic component of Narcissism.

Trump has the trade mark ‘big ego’ of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The irony is it’s lack of a healthy ego that’s the problem. The ego is full of gaps. There are sections of it you can drive sheep through. Its like having a claim that’s only marked off by corner posts, one of which has been eaten by a bear.

One solution is to identify with the bear. Your personal space is immediately cubed. Nothing can take you down. Bear is untroubled by life’s contradictions. Berries and Elk are all the same. You can just shamble on regardless.

Unfortunately, you might then need the world’s greatest ever shafting to be restored to more appropriately human proportions, a process that initially unfolds as the sado-masochistic tryst of Me and Not-me, the hell of Other People, the horror of realizing you are not the only one in the room.

You’d hope such developmental needs get resolved with incremental frustration of the toddler concerned. If not, the need for containment will find a more problematic expression. Whilst it may be colorful there is a small problem with this arrangement. Someone always has to get shamed.

Even when you are being praised.

Trump couldn’t help himself on his recent visit to troops in Iraq. The only way he could find to honor their service was, ‘you are no longer the suckers of the world.’ You try to be happy about that but somehow can’t quite summon the strength.

Words matter because they create consciousness. Abracadabra. That which I speak, becomes. If you ask an eight year old on Christmas Eve if they still believe in Santa you are sadistically calling her world into doubt.

If you lack the basic internal cohesion required not to blow a Christmas media event for kids by casting aspersions on the existence of the main event, then the sadism is not just gratuitous, it states your values. Its like wearing a ‘blame it on the badger’ t-shirt to an animal rights meet.

Such behavior would not be tolerated round the household dinner table let alone by the leader of the free world and the reason is that kids and impressionable folk take their example from you, Donny.

In fact the bench mark of Democracy is not just that your job is the highest in the land but that every kid that ever there was secretly aspires to be you, to have power and authority..

and to use it for good..

but how the fuck can they when every example they are given entails someone being screwed over? I pummel the Other into the ground therefor I am. WTF?

What on earth must you be compensating for to want to put kids in cages? What ghosts must haunt you to justify it with the paranoid delusion that they ‘harbor’ disease? Not that some are sick and need your help but that they sneak in armed with it, all sheltered and weaponized.

When an innocent child, fleeing for his life from situations others cannot even acknowledge, let alone survive, is then so failed by the hero he hoped would save him that he dies from sadistic neglect, you send a message. It is not a message of deterrence. Numbers are up. But it is a message of How-to-Be, delivered into the living rooms of every family in the Nation and around the world.

And finally, mounted on top of the heinous betrayal of that poor boy’s faith, a faith he held for hundreds of miles of weary trudging towards the fabled arms of safety, is the cowardly insinuation from Nielsen’s report making this not only his own fault but on account of his malign ‘harbouring’, as though he was some kind of gook whose evil plan backfired.

as though their not giving a shit constituted counterintelligence.

When a person in high office stoops to such gaslighting the moral being created is way beyond giving permission to hold office without embodying it in any way shape or form. It’s not simply the absence of something, a lack of care, or the failure of empathy.

Nor should we limit ourselves to Adam Serwer’s excellent u-tube blog that cruelty is something Trump has elevated to political virtue.

This boy’s death sets the bar of what it means to be human at a new low. Suddenly, all our lives are cheaper; contaminated, not by diseased migrants but by the malignant use of an Office to which the Nation looks for guidance, finding at bottom only the secret puerile need to be sent to the naughty corner so that he can get through another day without medication.


Trumpty Dumpty.

Trumpty Dumpty bet on his wall,

Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall,

All of his Base and all Putin’s men,

Couldn’t put Trumpty together again!

Did you ever wonder about the meaning of Humpty Dumpty? A mere cautionary tale for naughty children? I think not…

The nursery rhyme has been associated with Richard 111’s defeat at Bosworth. And with the execution of Charles 1. But the best candidate for any historical origin has to be Charles the V1 of France whose love/hate relationship with his brother Louis resulted in strange behaviour for the normally outdoorsy king. After a number of setbacks he retired to a gloomy room where he remained immobile for hours under the delusional conviction that he was made of glass and might break if moved about….

The glass delusion then became rather fashionable and for the next two hundred years it slowly gained popularity, becoming more and more common until the 1600s,

”when it turned into a genuine cultural phenomenon.”E. Inglis-Arkell.

Can there really be fads in madness? Was the glass delusion a way of faithful if misguided subjects identifying with their leader to the point of sharing his affliction? Or were both king and commoner suffering from some dark zeitgeist of the times?

The glass delusion is much less popular than it was. I have only come across a single instance in thirty years of practice, a man who could not look at me for fear of his malady’s contagion and kept his gaze safely fixed upon the wall for as long as he had to share space with anyone getting so dangerously close..

But even though modernity may not be able to boast of the auntie in the attic who cannot be moved for fear of terminal splintering, you still find more people seeking therapeutic help than you might think whose experience harks back to the fragile vulnerability of Charles V1, who fear being ‘seen through’ and shattered as a result, who feel unable to act for fear of breaking their shell thin self construct.

Without the specific delusion of being actually made of glass, a person is no longer schizophrenic but might still be dissociated to the point of warranting a diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder or Schizo-affective Disorder, both of which are rather confusing terms because what the MPD really needs is loads more different aspects of himself and for them to hang out together, instead of being bounced between one limiting corner of his psyche at a time, wherein he can only have restricted engagement with self and others.

It’s like having most of the village chased off into the jungle and those that remain alternately claiming to be the sole survivor.

Like wise the term ‘schizo-affective’ might lead you to assume loads of emoting but actually denotes the fragility of a very narrow feeling range, like trying to play the piano with most of the keys out of action which means banging out a few chords over and over to make up for loss of nuance and variation….

In modern literature Lewis Carroll’s looking glass fantasy features Humpty…

” as a rather uppity egg who uses words however he wishes to, without worrying that nobody else will understand him. ” Interesting literature.

which is just what dissociation does. Truth is not truth.

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Alice through the Looking Glass.

It looks as though Humpty is all about power but actually it’s about making sure he doesn’t break into a thousand pieces. In order to do that, the meaning of everything becomes negotiable in the effort to stave off experience that threatens Humpty’s precarious perch.

“I know words, I have the best words. I have the best, but there is no better word than stupid.” Donald J Trump.

An egg can symbolize the wholeness of inner unity, but it also represents having all your eggs in one basket, that being-on-the-edge-of-disaster and flying by the seat of your pants which constitutes having just a very few timeworn if familiar faces to show an infinitely more complex and demanding world.

Such restricted perspectives are invariably the fate of Kings, Princes and Special Children who have their hands on the nation’s tiller or feel they ought to because they are compelled to identify with archetypal energies that exclude the Principle of Relatedness. King Ludwig of Bavaria referred to his mother as ‘the widow of my late predecessor’. And that was when he was in a good mood. Otherwise she was referred to as, ‘the Colonel of the 3rd Artillery Regiment.’

If mother is a regiment what does that make baby?

If women have to identify with their masculinity to keep abreast of men then their mothering function will collectively suffer. The mother/infant bond will be invariably undermined where the divine feminine has been driven out or degraded. Mother’s anxiety at being so under-represented has to be parceled off and lived out by the child instead, who must now forgo her own feelings about what is happening into the bargain.

Under such circumstances what is baby to do?

The horror of what is unfolding has to be projected. Mother cannot be the recipient because it is from her that this toxic dilemma has come. So the child hives off the trauma into the future where it can be kept at arms length. True, the child is left with any number of shattering fears about what the future holds, but at least ‘now’ is safe.

”Catastrophic expectation is a memory.” D. Winnicott.

The glass delusion’s fears of being broken can still be warded off with magical protective clothing or by staying super still, or having expensive lawyers, giving the idea that the prospect of shattering can be omnipotently avoided when in fact it has already occurred.

Unfortunately, the Humpty gambit has small print. You may not have to experience your fragility till tomorrow but the bow wave of it will produce paranoia today. Paranoia is the implicit recognition that the resources you have to manage current situations are somehow incomplete and that you can not function optimally in your environment. So it seems as if the world is full of frustrating forces trying to drag you down with only a brittle shell to prevent you getting scrambled.

If such dilemmas remained the preserve of weird historical figures it would not be so scary. The story of Charles V1 and his long legacy of fellow glass citizens suggests that such things not only tumble through generations. They are contagious and  infect entire populations.

From the recent best seller, ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,”…

”His madness is catching, too. From the trauma people have experienced under the Trump administration to the cult-like characteristics of his followers, he has created unprecedented mental health consequences across our nation and beyond. It’s not all in our heads. It’s in his…” Bandy Lee

Yes, and….

when the fall finally happens, dancing till dawn in the streets will need to be leavened with the sobering thought that Trump is more than a man who thought he was above the law. He symbolizes the entitlement, the belligerence and the dissocciated fragility of Western superiority itself. After he is gone, we will still have to address the narcissistic shadow of the culture that spawned him within the inner recesses of our own souls.

The Emperor’s New Clothes.

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.

 

Of Cockerels and Presidents.

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.

 

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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