Culture War is Class War disguised. The Wealthy Elite–the "Filthy Rich"–foment Culture War in society to distract and cover their real economic motives. Culture War, Class War explores the resulting cultural divide–how it was instigated and kept alive for fifty years in America by certain elite powers and how and why they choose to benefit while tearing families in two and keeping America paralyzed.
Why We Invite War, Allow Fascism, and Pollute: Our Coming Into the World Makes Us Want to Leave It
The question posed at the end of the last chapter was whether we had opened the door to an unimaginable armageddon or were experiencing the birth pangs of a massive consciousness transformation and subsequent Earth rebirth. Are we going to self-destruct, bringing death to the entire planet along with us, or will we become good citizens of this planet and our species continue on?
What Say We Leave a Planet For Our Offspring?
Most folks would think there would be only one answer to that question desired by virtually all humans. But in previous chapters, especially Apocalypse Emergency, Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking, I showed how, and why, that common-sense notion would, amazingly, be wrong: We saw how there is a huge percentage of our human Earth citizens, and a part of all of us, that wants to “throw in the towel.” This has always been true of humans, but it is of critical importance only now.
But I will assume anyone reading this will at least consciously be wanting our vital question to be answered in the affirmative. You know as well as I that the folks on the other side of this question are doing vastly different things right now than us and are nowhere to be found around here.
How Do We “Like” Life?
So the next thing to be addressed is how we might change our fortunes and live. Since continuing on is not just of matter of deciding it—voting “like” on it or checking its box—as we saw in Chapter Five: Death Wish, how can we get around this part of ourselves and our population that wants to do us all in? We need to know how to derail our perpetual cycles of war and violence. We need know how to quit bringing pollution and suffering on us. We have to know how we can stop our secret desire to take comfort in failure, how to “unlike” self-sabotage on our inner “profile.”
How Do We “Unlike” Fascism?
I have written a great deal on this question, including an entire book in 2011 on the way we act out this masochistic tendency politically and culturally by taking comfort in totalitarianism and embracing fascism. [Footnote 1]
For our purposes presently I will focus on the element of it all that is critical to answering our question. So we first need to look into the place from which emanates our dilemma. I showed that this bugaboo is our Will to Death.
Our Coming Into This World Makes Us Want to Leave It
Now we need to get more specific on this negative inclination of ours. As we have seen this Will to Death arises from human’s unique-among-all-species primal pain rooted in our singular way of coming into the world, our unique human birth.
We Need Look Deeper
We need to look deeper into the elements of that part of ourselves that would have us take us all down. We need inquire into that tendency of ours to choose pollution over health, tyranny over freedom, war over peace, enslavement over autonomy, violence over pacifism, oppression over liberty, misery over happiness. We must derail the cycles of war, violence, and fascism. We must know how to “like” happiness.
We Need Know Where Exactly to Focus Our Efforts to Be Successful
To do so, we must separate the skeins of this inner entanglement and shed light into this darkness within. We need to know specifically, precisely where to place the lever of effort we will apply to truly move the world, to derail it from its current acceleration into oblivion.
So we look now into the elements of that perinatal unconscious manifesting currently as a will to die on the grandest scale imaginable.
Cycles of War, Cycles of Birth
We find there are two researchers who are particularly relevant to our understanding of the elements of the perinatal unconscious in a way as to avert collective, worldwide disaster. These are Stanislav Grof and Lloyd DeMause. [Footnote 2]
Men Would Rather Be “Manly” Than…Alive…
DeMause writes,
[T]he group-fantasy shared prior to wars expresses the nation’s deep feeling that the increase in pleasure brought about by the prosperity and progress that usually precede wars “pollutes” the national blood-stream with sinful excess, making men “soft” and feminine”—a frightful condition that can only be cleansed by a blood-shedding purification. [Footnote 2]
Men are more terrified of appearing “feminine” than of losing their lives. Why we invite war.
DeMause is saying we go forever into war because after a while peace makes men feel guilty, “sinful.” Men have uncomfortable, even shameful…homophobic…feelings of being “soft” or “feminine” when their lives are good. So men choose the “purifying,” masculinizing ritual of war to fight off these feelings. Nothing distracts one from looking inward better than a “good, old-fashioned” life-or-death struggle, and war is the most all-encompassing of them.
Men are more terrified of appearing “soft” than having the boot of totalitarianism on their neck. Why we allow fascism.
What DeMause says about bringing war upon us can be said also about allowing fascism, inviting totalitarianism. For whether we are fighting enemies of another nation or struggling to survive against oppression at home, we are involved in a daily struggle. Secret to us, we feel better being engaged in a dramatic battle, though it brings us suffering and misery.
We simply can’t hack peace for very long. We feel guilty, for some reason, lolling on the beach. You ever notice how at the end of your vacation time, you are anxious for it to be over and to get back to work? That feeling—that one where we feel…guilty?…uncomfortable…tense?…unfulfilled?…(you tell me)—that’s it. That’s the one I’m talking about.
It happens the same way collectively after we have experienced a “vacation” of national peace—for example, in the Nineties when we were prosperous and mostly peaceful under Clinton. At the end of it, with Bush, we ended up getting the misery and struggle many in America were driven to want, though no one would ever admit that.
A quick aside. The fact that the majority of Americans actually didn’t vote for Bush and so tried to choose happiness over struggle is a source of hope for us in all this. That’s a hint of what’s coming.
Four Kinds of Early Experience Color Our Adult Experience in Four Distinct Ways … Cycles of Birth and War
Four Kinds of Experiences in Our First Nine Months Imprint Us for Four Feeling “Flavors” as Adults
But for now, let us get back to this opening provided us. We can make better use of deMause’s insight on the birth feelings that take us into war using Stanislav Grof’s delineation of this birth unconscious of ours. Let us review as described earlier and further stipulate on them: Grof explains we are moved as adults by four specific kinds of drives emanating from our earliest experiences. These specific tendencies in us relate to four different times in the birth process which involve four radically different kinds of experiences.
Grof uses the term, basic perinatal matrices (BPMs), to refer to these four aspects of our inner urges. I will describe them here and refer to them along with DeMause’s cycles of social-historical violence and war to pull apart the roots of our current apocalyptic dilemma. [Footnote 3]
Our Tendency to Always Screw Up a Good Thing, BPM I
The first of Grof’s aspects of our unconscious he terms Basic Perinatal Matrix I, BPM I for short.
Prosperity and Progress Equal Feeling “Soft” and “Feminine”
Grof’s BPM I is sometimes described as “oceanic bliss” and involves the experiences and feelings related to the relatively undisturbed prenatal period. On the social, macrocosmic level, it is the period described in the quote by deMause above in which there is a period of “prosperity and progress” and feelings of being “soft” and “feminine.”
The strong connection between individual experience (personal psychology) and collective realities (social-historical events and elements) is patent here since in BPM I experience the individual is still in the mother’s womb and to some extent shares her identity, which is of course feminine. Being unborn and not having gone through the “toughening” experiences of birth and later trauma, which predominantly create one’s defenses, the individual is also “soft,” in other words, undefended.
“No Pain, No Gain,” Hell, Satan, and Poisonous Placenta; BPM II
“No-Exit” Claustrophobia
To further review Grof’s schema and its relation to deMause’s cycles of war, I want to remind you that BPM II is related on the individual level to the time near the end of pregnancy when the fetus is no longer rocking blissfully on the waves of oceanic bliss but is trapped in an ever more confining womb. As the fetus grows in size, the suffering becomes greater; no doubt this is the source of the common-sense belief that growing has to involve suffering, for example, “No pain, no gain.” At any rate, the feelings are those of claustrophobia and “no exit.”
There is heavy non-agitated depression here, since there appears to be no hope, no change in the situation that would indicate a way out of the suffering. Indeed, this period continues practically right up to the time of birth, ending only when the cervix becomes dilated and, experientially speaking, there appears suddenly to be a “light at the end of the tunnel” and therefore hope.
Where the Hell We Get the Idea of Hell
However, up until that time there are feelings of being totally unempowered, completely in the hands of an entity—the womb—that imposes a horrifying reality that appears to be unending and eternal. Herein we have the psychological roots of notions of hell and Satan. Feelings associated with this state include despair, victimization, blame, and guilt.
“You’ll Wallow in Your Shit, and You’ll Think You’re Happy.” – Kurt Cobain, from the Song, “Sad”
As birth comes nearer, “fetal malnutrition” increases, since the neonate’s increasing size and weight press down on and constrict the blood vessels that carry blood to and from the placenta, when the mother is standing. The decreased blood supply means a reduction of life-giving oxygen as well as the buildup of toxins that would otherwise be taken away by a normal blood flow. So feelings of suffocation as well as skin irritation and other feelings of wallowing in waste matter—deemed poisonous placenta by deMause—increase. [Footnote 4]
“You’re Really in a Laundry Room.” – Kurt Cobain, from the Song, “Sad”
As I have said previously, deMause has found that these feelings exist to an extraordinary degree in a society and its leaders prior to its engaging in a war. Similarly, they precede, and obviously can be held to be accountable for, individual acts of violence—including everything from murder and rape to unfortunately all-too-common and ordinary spousal and child abuse in the household, and of course everything in between.
Bloody War, Bloody Birth — BPM III
BPM III is birth. Its social analogue is war or violent assault. Feelings that accompany this state on both the individual and societal level include rage and intense aggressiveness, all-encompassing struggle, and sexual excess.
Nothing’s Ever Good Enough, BPM IV
BPM IV relates to the time of actually coming out of the womb and the post-natal period. On the societal level it is the ending of a war.
“Busting Out All Over”
Feelings of expansiveness, release, exultation, coming finally out into the light and/or being “on top” of things, and victory are feelings associated with this matrix, whether in the individual birth or the collective war cycle.
As I said the societal analogue to BPM IV, or actually being born, is a war’s end. It is no coincidence that in triumph or peace, the two-finger peace symbol is used. What better way to signal we have come from constriction into openness, specifically through the vise of a mother’s cervix, out from between two legs. As John Lennon so aptly put it, using the peace sign frequently, “War is over (if we want it).”
Mission Accomplished … Not!
Interestingly, just as in recent times harsh modern obstetrical practices and the removal of the baby from the mother can leave lifetime feelings of success not bringing with it the expected rewards and thus a post-accomplishment sort of depression, so also the ending of successful wars sometimes also leaves a society with a sort of letdown. For example, the euphoria following George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War—which catapulted his approval ratings into the ninety percent range in 1991—was followed, only a year later, by the increasing agony of a recession and Bush’s defeat at the polls.
Cycles of Birth, Cycles of War
All of this is to say that in society, as in the womb, a period of uninterrupted and relatively undisturbed feelings of growth leads to feelings of depression—being too “soft” and “feminine,” but also “too fat” in the womb and, therefore, extremely constricted and compressed.
Why Women Fear Becoming Fat and Men Fear Appearing “Feminine”
Another way of saying this: feelings of expansion are followed by a fear of entrapment. And I agree wholeheartedly with deMause in saying that it happens this way in a nation’s cycle of feelings because it happened that way to us prior to and during our births. We have these patterns of feelings as collective groups of individuals because our first experience of expansion was followed by extreme depression, guilt, despair, and then struggle and something bloodily akin to war—our actual births.
To Derail War and Violence, Replace Self-Sabotaging With Self-Actualizing … We Can No Longer Afford Our Delusional Ways
What Can Be Done?
So knowing this, how can we use it? In previous chapters, I explained how and why we see the dynamics of this perinatal unconscious, not coincidentally right now, on the ascendance, just at the time when it is crucial we deal with it to survive. I called this an emerging perinatal unconscious, and I went into detail about why it is happening now, what it means, and how we should take advantage of the opportunity it brings that could aid us in our current dilemma.
For now, I need only remind that is imperative we face these unconscious forces instead of turning away from and thereby insuring our continued ignorance of them and helpless acting out of them.
So, how do we consciously participate in these drives, not merely be driven by them?
Lloyd DeMause, in his article, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence,” printed in the spring 1996 issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, called for kinder and gentler birthing and child-caring practices to mitigate the ferocity of these forces within humans and help us avoid an otherwise inevitable planetary disaster. He was restating what other pre- and perinatal psychologists…I am one, by the way…including Thomas Verny and Stanislav Grof assert. [Footnote 5]
However, I believe we need to go further than that. I, along with Grof, call for a larger awareness of and efforts in the direction of healing these perinatal elements in the consciousness and unconscious of those already alive right now. For unless we act to heal the people currently inhabiting this planet, we might not leave a planet that babies can be born into!…let alone people to conceive and give birth to them. Healing the perinatal traumas can be accomplished through, at this point, thoroughly tested and effective techniques of experiential regression and emotional release.
But it is impossible for everyone to take advantage of these techniques, especially in the short time we have to make the changes. But something short of that ideal may be sufficient to stave off otherwise inevitable doom.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
Finding the Weakest Spot
Of course only time will tell what will be the result of this emerging perinatal unconscious for our species.
Real, not blindly delusional, action is required.
But to get an idea of what we might hope for, given a readiness to actually do something about this, I offer a perspective. This understanding requires we remember some critical aspects of the cartography of the psyche described above. Looking into them we might begin to see where are the openings allowing for realistic action to be taken to bring about true, not just blindly delusional, change for our species.
We can no longer afford otherwise.
For our purposes here, the most important part of the cycle is BPM I. Societies, according to deMause, go through these cycles of war and peace and have been doing so for as long as we know. But we can no longer afford these wars, as World War I and World War II have shown—with each one being an increase in our ability to destroy and to commit atrocities. We cannot afford to have a World War III as that most likely would end life on our planet.
Indeed, as I’ve been pointing out, we cannot even afford the less extreme forms of acting out of perinatal trauma that we have been doing in our poisoning of the earth and air, global overpopulation, and the ongoing regional wars to give just a few of many examples I could have used. These things, along with many other current quite insane tendencies of ours, have the capacity to end our species and possibly all life on this planet.
Feeling Good Is Not Bad
So the cycle of societal perinatal acting out must be stopped. And the most obvious place to derail the insidious cycle is at the point of societal prosperity and progress. Feeling soft, undefended, and feminine are, rationally speaking, not things to be alarmed about.
Quite to the contrary, it is rational that prosperity should make people feel good. It is rational that feeling soft should be a source of contentment, sensitivity, and intimacy with others. It makes sense that men should have no shame about feeling feminine because that only means that they have access to sensitive and nurturing feelings that are a source of joy, “color,” and fulfillment in life.
Changing the Patterns of Millennia
But how do we do this? How do we convince people that feeling good is not bad? For these unconscious forces, these cycles of violence, have been pulling our strings for at least tens of thousands of years. How can we change such an engrained pattern?
Chasing the Mirages of the Future
Well, again, we get our leads from the experiences of individuals undergoing experiential psychotherapy.
“It’s never enough.”
For individuals also, if they are to heal themselves, have to learn how to appreciate success and to stop sabotaging themselves in the myriad of ways they do. Individuals act out their mini-cycles of “war” in their struggles to achieve. And people are driven to struggle to achieve because they cannot be pleased with what they have.
Relating back to deMause’s societal schema, people cannot simply enjoy their “prosperity.” People cannot stop to smell the roses occasionally. We cannot count our blessings and feel contented with what we have. Nor can we enjoy the natural pleasure of being alive in the moment.
“Wrong…It IS enough.”
No, instead what characterizes we humans—for the most part because of our having birth trauma—is a persistent drive to always have more than we do. We find that every accomplishment or success is short lived, with inexplicable depression following it. For each new attainment does not bring the expected (unconscious) rewards and leads us almost immediately to a new struggle, a new accomplishment to be sought.
Humans are driven to chasing mirages of better times somewhere off in the future, and we fail to live in the present. We feel unsatisfied with what we have and are continually deluded that some new possession, accomplishment, or love “conquest” will bring with it the missing happiness.
Becoming Self-Actualizing Instead of Self-Sabotaging
When people are aware of the way they unconsciously sabotage their happiness, they sometimes seek help. And if they seek help in the experiential psychotherapies, they are enabled to work through their birth trauma so that they are no longer driven out of the moment, with its pleasure and pain, into an imagined but never attainable pleasureful and happy future.
Learning that it is enough
So people derail their cycles of drivenness and their tendencies to sabotage their successes by learning to enjoy their “prosperity,” even if it is the simple pleasure of being alive. And when they act to add to that pleasantness, they do so, not out of drivenness, but out of feelings of flow and the simple joys of acting and actualizing one’s tendencies, talents, and desires. They become self-actualizing instead of self-sabotaging.
A Hierarchy of Healing … Becoming Human Beings (Not Doings): Removing the Hood from Homophobes, A Hard Rain, and Stand
OK, knowing this, one might ask if I am suggesting that to save our species everyone needs to get into experiential therapy. While that would be nice, it is not practical.
But I believe it is not necessary either. There is an element of that societal period of prosperity that can be used and focused on in order to make the societal change of pattern, the societal derailing of the tendency to self-sabotage through war-making.
Getting By, With a Little Help From Our Nature
And that element is this: During times of prosperity, when one is less engaged in a struggle to survive, we find that one’s body will naturally try to heal itself of unresolved and somatically imprinted trauma by bringing into consciousness the repressed traumatic memories needing resolution.
Hierarchy of Healing
This occurs in a manner similar to that of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Basically, one’s needs to “grow emotionally”…i.e., clear away the unresolved trauma…can only come to the fore when one’s physical survival needs are relatively taken care of. And arise they unerringly do, given any opportunity to do so.
“Don’t just do something, STAND there!”
However, when these traumatic memories come up seeking resolution, they, also unerringly, bring with them the associated feelings of depression, unease, and pain. But because these feelings are anything but pleasant, to their detriment most people seek to avoid these feelings through addictions and other forms of “acting-out” behavior. So addictions and acting-out behavior emerge after periods of relative stability precisely because that stability allows unresolved feelings an opening for emergence and a possibility of resolution and healing.
Allowing Our Society to Be Honestly, Blatantly “Sick”
So there you have it; that is the crux. The period of societal prosperity can be maintained and added to if that society refuses to run away from the negative feelings that come up with success. As I have said, one needs to get “sicker” in order to get really well.
“Stand in the Place Where You Are … Just Stand.”
Societally, we need to allow the social, formerly repressed, “sicknesses,” negativities, and the pain that comes with them to arise and be socially worked out, to be hashed out, rather than to escape them by resorting to scapegoating enemies and waging war against them. [Footnote 6]
Are We Doing This?
But can societies do this? Are they doing this?
Apparently Not
It does not seem so at the moment. For we have extreme acting out going on from Tea Party type elements. The homophobia that characterizes them is an indicator of the degree to which they are fearful of that feeling of being “soft” and “feminine,” I mentioned.
But Then Again…
However there is a pattern in change that things can not really change until the negative slide has “hit bottom.” These negative forces cannot be gone beyond until they have wasted themselves in desperate acts. At this time also, positive forces are strengthening in the wings, burnishing their skills, tempering their character and nobility, fully capable when the time comes to take over. There are so many examples of this in social and individual histories, but not to get bogged down, I will mention one powerful one—Nelson Mandela. You can take it from there.
The more common thing to mention about change is that prior to a major paradigm shift, the forces on the decline always wage a fierce, desperate battle…a bloody retreat, a burning of the fields, near suicidal and totally reckless forays.
We see people do this, too, just before they are about to change. We see people who self-destruct being the ones whose last desperate battle before awareness can dawn being something that takes their life and perhaps others with them.
We currently can point to Gaddafi, Assad, and other tyrants. We can observe reckless tea-baggers willing, as in the debt ceiling clash, to bring down the country for ideals that, however rationalized and spun, are at their roots as simple and crude as jealousy—of those smarter and more capable; hatred—of minorities, the poor, the “dirty,” the “slobs,” the “lazy”…basically all the scapegoats society allows them to vent the rage of their inner fears and hurt on; and homophobia—that fear of being “soft,” feminine, unmasculine, and being willing to kill or be killed rather than to let oneself be seen that way.
Homophobes Don’t Fear Homosexuals … They Fear What’s Inside Themselves
Before continuing, one big misconception around that last point needs clearing up: homophobia is at base not fear/hatred of homosexuals, it is terror/hatred of the “feminine” and “softness” inside of the man himself who is homophobic. And this is the result of tens of thousands of years of “civilization,” still continuing, in which men are threatened with disapproval, ostracism, ridicule, attack, or worse for not repressing their softer sides down to the level of the norm of their group.
Boys Learn They Must Be Less Alive to Survive
Boys learn they must constrict their potentials and diminish themselves to that which coincides with—and does not threaten—the older males in their group or face severe punishment. Boys learn the consequences for not becoming less than they could be are severe, often from their own fathers.
Girls Learn They Must Feel Less Pleasure to Be Liked
And by the way, something similar goes on with young girls and the reduction of their potentials. We see a blatant example of this in the practice of cliterectomy—also called female genital mutilation—in some cultures. In this practice the older women—mother and aunts usually—are responsible for this brutal and extremely painful and bloody attack. It tells little girls they will have no pleasure more than that which was allowed the older women, themselves, in that patriarchal world. So girls must diminish themselves in order to not be hated and ostracized by the women of the group, who, already having been diminished, would be jealous of someone being allowed to have what they have not. This is an exact mirror image of the process that goes on in the diminution of the personalities—the potentials—of young boys.
A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
Now to continue: So seeing so much of this pathos, hate, and bitter fear and anger is hopeful for us to be near the end of the cycle. Certainly it could get worse. But I personally don’t see how we could go much further on this path to oblivion without going past the point of no return. Perhaps we are not meant to succeed. Perhaps we are doomed. But I know in my own life, and that is the only true basis anyone can have for knowing how things really work, that, without fail, every seeming “loss of ground” was a prelude to an even bigger “advance.”
As Jung said, we need to take two steps backward to make a big leap forward. That is the way individuals are. And societies and populations are just collections of individuals. As the Tao symbol depicts, the seed of light is in the depths of darkness. So we can hold on to that, for one thing.
So Let Us See. A Scenery of Healing?
With these considerations in mind, the next chapter will evaluate our current social-cultural scenery for our prospects. In Rebirthing Rituals – The Sometimes Messy Scenery of Healing—we will look for any indications that this standing firm in the face of the rising up of the repressed social Shadow—allowing the pain of it and facing it foursquare, hashing it out—is to be found in the current social arena.
If we can find this being done, we may allow ourselves at least the hope for a change in consciousness radical enough to save us from extinction. On the contrary, if we find little or no evidence for this kind of auspicious, fruitful healing activity, we might as well consider ourselves doomed.
Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
4.“You’ll wallow in the shit and you’ll think you’re happy” and “You’re really in a laundry room” from, and with appreciation to, Kurt Cobain. These are lyrics in his song, “Sad.” The video and lyrics are reproduced again here for your convenience:
Nirvana – “Sad” (also “Sappy” and “Verse Chorus Verse”) – Lyrics
And if you save yourself You will make him happy He’ll keep you in a jar And you’ll think you’re happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you’ll think you’re happy He’ll cover you with grass And you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room, You’re really in a laundry room Conclusion came to you, oh And if you cut yourself You will think you’re happy He’ll keep you in a jar Then you’ll make him happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you’ll think you’re happy He’ll cover you with grass Then you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room, You’re really in a laundry room Conclusion came to you, oh (x2) And if you fool yourself You will make him happy He’ll keep you in a jar And you’ll think you’re happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you will seem happy You’ll wallow in your shit Then you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room (x3) Conclusion came to you, oh Alternate lyrics: And if you kill yourself You will make him happy
Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
6. “Stand in the place where you are…just stand” from and with appreciation to R.E.M. While it seems no one understood the group’s huge initial release, “Stand,” it is quite meaningful in the current context. A video and lyrics are included here for your consideration:
R.E.M. – “Stand” … lyrics
Stand in the place where you live
Now face North
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven’t before
Now stand in the place where you work
Now face West
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t before
If you are confused check with the sun
Carry a compass to help you along
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
[repeat 1st verse]
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
If wishes were trees the trees would be falling
Listen to reason
Season is calling
[repeat 1st verse]
If wishes were trees the trees would be falling
Listen to reason
Reason is calling
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
So Stand (stand)
Now face North
Think about direction, wonder why you haven’t before
Now stand (stand)
Now face West
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t
[repeat 1st verse]
Stand in the place where you are (Now face North)
Stand in the place where you are (Now face West)
Your feet are going to be on the ground (Stand in the place where you are)
Your head is there to move you around, so stand.
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence – Audiocasts
Why We Invite War, Allow Fascism, and Pollute: Our Coming Into the World Makes Us Want to Leave It
The question posed at the end of the last chapter was whether we had opened the door to an unimaginable armageddon or were experiencing the birth pangs of a massive consciousness transformation and subsequent Earth rebirth. Are we going to self-destruct, bringing death to the entire planet along with us, or will we become good citizens of this planet and our species continue on?
What Say We Leave a Planet For Our Offspring?
Most folks would think there would be only one answer to that question desired by virtually all humans. But in previous chapters, especially Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking, I showed how, and why, that common-sense notion would, amazingly, be wrong: We saw how there is a huge percentage of our human Earth citizens, and a part of all of us, that wants to “throw in the towel.” This has always been true of humans, but it is of critical importance only now.
But I will assume anyone reading this will at least consciously be wanting our vital question to be answered in the affirmative. You know as well as I that the folks on the other side of this question are doing vastly different things right now than us and are nowhere to be found around here.
.
How Do We “Like” Life?
So the next thing to be addressed is how we might change our fortunes and live. Since continuing on is not just of matter of deciding it—voting “like” on it or checking its box—as we saw in Chapter Five: Death Wish, how can we get around this part of ourselves and our population that wants to do us all in? We need to know how to derail our perpetual cycles of war and violence. We need know how to quit bringing pollution and suffering on us. We have to know how we can stop our secret desire to take comfort in failure, how to “unlike” self-sabotage on our inner “profile.”
How Do We “Unlike” Fascism?
I have written a great deal on this question, including an entire book in 2011 on the way we act out this masochistic tendency politically and culturally by taking comfort in totalitarianism and embracing fascism. [Footnote 1]
For our purposes presently I will focus on the element of it all that is critical to answering our question. So we first need to look into the place from which emanates our dilemma. I showed that this bugaboo is our Will to Death.
Our Coming Into This World Makes Us Want to Leave It
Now we need to get more specific on this negative inclination of ours. As we have seen this Will to Death arises from human’s unique-among-all-species primal pain rooted in our singular way of coming into the world, our unique human birth.
We Need Look Deeper
We need to look deeper into the elements of that part of ourselves that would have us take us all down. We need inquire into that tendency of ours to choose pollution over health, tyranny over freedom, war over peace, enslavement over autonomy, violence over pacifism, oppression over liberty, misery over happiness. We must derail the cycles of war and violence. We must know how to “like” happiness.
We Need Know Where Exactly to Focus Our Efforts to Be Successful
To do so, we must separate the skeins of this inner entanglement and shed light into this darkness within. We need to know specifically, precisely where to place the lever of effort we will apply to truly move the world, to derail it from its current acceleration into oblivion.
So we look now into the elements of that perinatal unconscious manifesting currently as a will to die on the grandest scale imaginable.
Cycles of War, Cycles of Birth
We find there are two researchers who are particularly relevant to our understanding of the elements of the perinatal unconscious in a way as to avert collective, worldwide disaster. These are Stanislav Grof and Lloyd DeMause. [Footnote 2]
Men Would Rather Be “Manly” Than…Alive…
DeMause writes,
[T]he group-fantasy shared prior to wars expresses the nation’s deep feeling that the increase in pleasure brought about by the prosperity and progress that usually precede wars “pollutes” the national blood-stream with sinful excess, making men “soft” and feminine”—a frightful condition that can only be cleansed by a blood-shedding purification. [Footnote 2]
Men are more terrified of appearing “feminine” than of losing their lives. Why we invite war.
DeMause is saying we go forever into war because after a while peace makes men feel guilty, “sinful.” Men have uncomfortable, even shameful…homophobic…feelings of being “soft” or “feminine” when their lives are good. So men choose the “purifying,” masculinizing ritual of war to fight off these feelings. Nothing distracts one from looking inward better than a “good, old-fashioned” life-or-death struggle, and war is the most all-encompassing of them.
Men are more terrified of appearing “soft” than having the boot of totalitarianism on their neck. Why we allow fascism.
What DeMause says about bringing war upon us can be said also about allowing fascism, inviting totalitarianism. For whether we are fighting enemies of another nation or struggling to survive against oppression at home, we are involved in a daily struggle. Secret to us, we feel better being engaged in a dramatic battle, though it brings us suffering and misery.
We simply can’t hack peace for very long. We feel guilty, for some reason, lolling on the beach. You ever notice how at the end of your vacation time, you are anxious for it to be over and to get back to work? That feeling—that one where we feel…guilty?…uncomfortable…tense?…unfulfilled?…(you tell me)—that’s it. That’s the one I’m talking about.
It happens the same way collectively after we have experienced a “vacation” of national peace—for example, in the Nineties when we were prosperous and mostly peaceful under Clinton. At the end of it, with Bush, we ended up getting the misery and struggle many in America were driven to want, though no one would ever admit that.
A quick aside. The fact that the majority of Americans actually didn’t vote for Bush and so tried to choose happiness over struggle is a source of hope for us in all this. That’s a hint of what’s coming.
Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence – Audiocasts
Apocalypse No! Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking
Apocalypse is How an Over-Achieving Species Like Ours Does Its Will to Death
Freud showed we had a will to die…so — Will we survive? Will we wake up from global apathy to save our planet? Will we resist cowardly denial or die out like the dinosaurs?
Will We Survive?
This chapter discusses an age-old question which has currently become of immense, literally vital, importance: Will our species survive or die out like the dinosaurs? is the most crucial issue of our time. It is related to the fundamental fact of our existence for it is about the struggle between the forces of Life and those of Death. The consequences as to the winner of that inner struggle have to do with no less than the continued survival of life on this planet or total planetary collapse.
Eros vs. Thanatos
In the struggle between the current powers of life versus death, it is helpful to remember Freud’s paradigm-shifting observations about the human psyche on Eros and Thanatos. Freud showed how all human lives are drawn out against the background of each person’s inner struggle between the opposing forces of life and death…Eros and Thanatos. Specifically, for our purposes here, Freud advanced an understanding that made his insights paradigm-shifting, specifically, that each of us carry within us a Will to Die, which he referred to as Thanatos. [continued after video]
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this chapter, click on the link to youtube above or click the audio player here:
“Sometimes the Lights Are Shining on Me.”
Freud established that we act out a will to live and to be in the sun and to have fun and to love and to like goodness and health and truth.
“Other Times I Can Barely See.”
Freud also saw that we have at other times an opposite feeling that causes us to want to live in the dark; to not be around people; to shy away from life and the light and being seen and recognized and even to wanting to be lonely. This feeling causes us to not care about fun, to hate and be angry, indeed to hate everyone and even to want to lash out at them for no reason other than what might be self-labeled as spite. It makes us jealous of those who find happiness or pleasure in their lives and impels us to lash out at them and make them suffer the way we, on the inside, know we do. Because of this self-defeating tendency we irrationally beat up on our own bodies as well and abuse them with all kinds of substances and behaviors.
Thanatos is why there are always Republicans or something like them — Pharisees, Inquisitors…
And times in which they hold sway—stifling, life- and creativity-averse, stagnant and little changing times: the Middle Ages, for example…
This downward pull makes us want to hate goodness, calling things “kumbaya moments.” This part of our nature causes us to be jealous of others who are more giving and to hate them for that, to call people “goody two-shoes” or say something is “schmaltzy,” or to be saying that all that good stuff is just “drama.” It has us putting out terms like “bleeding heart” liberals. It causes us to not care about the truth, but rather to say things instead to hurt, get revenge, to get back at. Or it has us say untruths to get advantage, to disable our competitors, to hide from the evils we commit which enslave us further in the hiding of them, and so much more.
Struggle Will Out
But Freud took it beyond our inner struggles and talked about how the events of the world, the actions and movements of history, and the dramas of all the ages are in fact the products of this inner struggle.
At this very moment, our lesser selves are taking us on a path that leads inevitably, one way or another, to total species extinction. But not just that, being the “overachieving” species we are, we are bringing total life extinction to this planet and possibly even planetary annihilation–the death of virtually all life on this Earth.
Our Dogma Barks Out Our Specialness
Dogma Barks Out Specialness
Well, Ain’t We Special?
Freud pointed out we have a Will to Live, too–nothing earth-shattering there. In fact, so far he is stating nothing more than the common-sensical beliefs of the masses. Indeed, it is the universally held mainstream near-definition of humans…one of those “obvious truths” about us we like to bless ourselves with. Freud’s first point, taken by itself, encapsulates the cliched view of What We Are—that what distinguishes our species above all others revolves around a superior Will to Life.
While common-sensical that our Will to Life is part of a species superiority of ours, it is wrong…going too far. For would anyone say that other species don’t also have an incredible Will To Live?
Not So Much
But this hyperbole or over-reaching in stating humans are unique in the degree of their Will to Life reinforces my point about Freud’s ideas being zeitgeist-shattering. For in this common, frequent, pervasive even universal, and nauseatingly repeated promulgation of supposedly the obvious, by any and all who speak before an audience—large or small, from a principal speaking in front of a gathering of high schoolers or a preacher before his gathering of church-goers to the TV media pundit before a world-wide audience, and even to a US President’s audience of even greater global reach—it is shown that our special Will to Life is not as true as is assumed. For if we had such a superior drive in us, would it need to be constantly reinforced and upheld, as if against some attack, or attacker? And if so, what is the feared attack or attacker?
And here we get a clue into Freud’s discovery and its utter undermining of all that which is normally said regarding our humanness. For regarding our being special in our Will to Live, this kind of “protesting too much” and its flip side of repeating it ad nauseum, as Shakespeare obviously saw points to a hidden agenda. Truths do not have to be repeated endlessly, mantram-like, even ritualistically. For they are self-evident and need as much propping up as the belief that the sky appears to be the color blue to us—and you don’t hear much about that, do you?
My Dogma Barks Out My Specialness
But the pervasive repetition of the supposed Truth of our species Will to Life—especially the blown-up version that has it being the thing that makes us human, different from other species, “superior” to other species (there’s a clue), and even “special” (clue. Getting it?)—points to its being, not so much truth as dogma. And dogma does need to be endlessly repeated in that such things are exactly about things that are not obvious truths.
In fact, this repetition of an obvious truth points to its being not true. In the previous chapter I showed how our “sad proselytists” have to say their untruths and unrealities out loud in order to buck up or reinforce their believability. So also human societies need to endlessly repeat, in order to reinforce against onslaughts of insight, their precious untruths.
But the reasons behind the promulgation of this supposed “obvious truth” go even beyond, since we are not dealing here with any conscious or acknowledged, let alone written and standardized, set of things not obvious. For indeed, in this sad repetition of our superior life-valuing, it is put out as being something not needing institutional backing, being simply true in its obviousness.
So what then? Well, this repetitive characterization of Us, as Humans, has all the indications of something that has an intention, however unconscious, that has a calculation, however desperate our desire to not see it, about it to achieve an effect on the audience—in this case—the masses of all humans.
.
Humans’ Uniqueness Among Species? We Suck Up
What is that pathetically overlooked intention? Well, let us take a look at what that effect might be.
Anytime you place our species above all others (true or not), you are making as much as anything else a play to butter up your audience of fellow humans and appeal to their vanity…and thus, making them feel good, hoping that they will feel good, or, like you in return. In commonspeak, that’s called “people-pleasing.” In the vernacular, it’s called “sucking up.”
OK, so we’ve established that people in front of audiences near-universally want to say things that will make their audience feel good towards them. No, not so fast. For that overlooks the fact that somehow…and get this; for if the spoken thing were of the obvious truth category, then why would this follow…that somehow all these people speaking out to others about the unique will to life they have know—somewhere inside them—that saying such a thing will, in fact, give people a good feeling. That’s another clue.
More Socratic Dialoguing
And again, continuing this Socratic dialogue, well, wouldn’t humans just, of course, feel good hearing about their being superior? Doesn’t everyone feel good when told they are better and such? Well, now we’re getting to where Freud took us. For he knew, as we all do if we simply think about it. The answer is “no, not necessarily or even usually.”
Think about it. If the Beatles were to be told they were a good band, would that give them a good feeling? No. certainly not. For that was so true as to be overwhelming and almost scary in its near-universal belief. And we can suppose that to them having that kind of power and influence because of their talent—especially when you come out of nowhere, from humble, unassuming backgrounds—may have been distressing to think about and hardly something wanted from others. How could they not wonder about this power, its source, where it would lead, and all that? I don’t think it happenchance that this success sent all of them into drug-taking—to both block it out as well as come to terms with it—into soul-searching of the spiritual and, especially John, of the therapeutic sort. Sometimes one does not want to be reminded of how “good” (and therefore powerful…therefore responsible) one is; there’s such a thing as feeling one is scary good.
Or take the obviously accomplished anybody, Pavarotti, say. Wanna tell Pavarotti he sings good? Don’t think he’d feel a thing.
But, you say, that’s because they hear that all the time.
Ok, granted that. But think about when it would have felt good to them. Look to your own experience and you realize that you feel good when people tell you things about yourself—especially when they state them as self-evident and obvious to all—about which you are not certain, about which you often or at least sometimes have doubts, and about which you are insecure! Look to your own life. Can anyone be flattered about the things they know to be without question? Can you be flattered about the color of your skin or hair, or about…. Well, not stated as a fact, you wouldn’t. A person would be flattered only if they had some bad feeling, insecurity in that area, first; and second, if that quality of them is not usually noted though it be assumed by everyone to be a good, positive, or “superior” thing.
This pervasive, mutual stroking we do has a result which is of dire consequence currently: We scapegoat our planetmates because of this pathetically low self-esteem and those who play on it.
Sycophantic, Suicidal Ape – “Quit Hitting Yourself!”
“Quit Hitting Yourself!” and Sycophantic, Suicidal Ape
Sycophantic Ape
Skipping to the point here. People can be made to feel good about things of themselves they are not sure of.
How to Make Someone Love You: Tell Them Something Wonderful About Themselves They Normally Doubt Is True
They will feel good, because the thing they would want to believe, the thing that would make them see themselves positively, the thing that would feed their slanted bias toward themselves…. Ok, I’ll finally use the word: The thing that would prop up and feed a person’s “ego” or the belief in one’s goodness, superiority, and so on, in a world of so many others, well that makes one feel good, whether it is true or not.
So, we see that the intention of this pathetic public pronouncing of a superior human will to live is to salve the egos of the masses. Why does it feel good? Because it is universally true that the ego is in constant assault from something which makes it feel not good.
What is that thing that makes people feel not good about themselves, so that being told something that counters that would make them feel good? Well, the answers, by psychologists since Freud, have many terms attached to them. And by the way, before the psychologists there were the theologians attempting to answer this. But Freud’s analysis not only answered it, but put it in the largest context possible—one into which both psychologists and theologians would find an inroad.
We can say, to backtrack a bit, that this pandering by those in front of audiences makes people feel good because it supports the defense system that all humans have erected against the real truth—that zeitgeist-shattering one that Freud was first to fully explicate. It feels good because it supports the denial that all humans have against the real truth that they feel about themselves, one of the things that human societies universally consign to that black hole of the Unapproved and Hidden. [Footnote 1]
“Quit Hitting Yourself!”
So this repetitive obvious truth about humans having a strong Will to Live is repeated to please audiences and make them feel good—”people-pleasing”—because it is a salve to the egos of the masses, which in reality are not merely bruised. No, this goes directly toward propping up a particular defense, a particular denial that we all carry. And that denial is that, IN TRUTH, humans don’t at all feel like they have a tremendous Will to Live. How can I say that? Well, how many things do you know you do which are “not good for you”? How many things do you not do which you know would aid the cause of our supposed universal desire to Live and to Live as long as possible?
The point is that humans, along with a Will to Life that is undeniable, also have a Will to Death.
How many times have you woken up, thought about all the pressures and obligations, or complexities, responsibilities…. thought about all the seemingly insurmountable obstacles or challenges that you are facing… thought about all the things that just have to get done, yet you feel that you could not possibly have the time to do all of them…. How many times have you woken up and felt overwhelmed with what life has become and not wished to just curl up, go back to sleep, and never wake up again? How many times have you taken to drugs or intoxicants in full knowledge of their negative and even dire concomitants and simply thought to yourself, “Aw, what the hell. If I were to die, so what? What’s so great about life anyway?” Or, with less clarity, simply said, “Well nobody lives forever!”
Do they sound like the pronouncements of a species that has a tremendous will to live? No, in fact, alongside our Will to Live, we have not only a Will to Die, but even a will to self-destruction.
Right about now, it might be occurring to you how this makes sense of so much, seemingly insane, human behavior we’ve seen of late. This Will to Die explains why we continue nonchalantly our march to armageddon. It shines light on how we can suck up air in cities that gives us raging allergies, clogs our lungs as bad as chronic smoking would, and will kill off the children we raise there long before their times. It reveals how we could drink poisoned water, blithely go about our business as the globe fills up with nuclear radiation and makes its way into our food supplies and as our government refuses even to test for it, and turn our backs as the oceans die, and killer tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis chalk up thousands in the kill column. It explains why people allow themselves to be enslaved and controlled by others—allowing fascism in established democracies—unconcernedly voting for rabid folk who would take away their rights and security and bring down their freedoms, health, and even lives, while watching those living under totalitarian systems risk their lives for a such freedom and rights and democracy. So much more.
But anyway….
Suicidal Ape
Now, the intention here is not to repeat all that Freud and psychologists have said in showing how this works. Besides, just look at the evidence around you of addiction, chronic accidentalism, unhealthy behavior habits without number, and of course the ultimate evidence: suicide.
And by the way, if we have such a strong Will to Live, superior to all other species, then explain why it is so that we are the only species that has suicide? And we’re supposed to be the conscious ones?
What Freud pointed out has tremendous explanatory power, especially now in our current worldwide financial upheaval, depression/recession, expanding global fascism, nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, near environmental collapse, wars and terrorism, nuclear armaments of planetary annihilation, and tendency to pollute body as well as environment, and even to do it thoughtlessly, in full knowledge of the consequences.
The Only Important Question and About That Inner Monster of Yours
The Only Important Question
and About That Inner Monster of Yours
I repeat: Freud established that we act out a will to live and to be in the sun and to have fun and to love and to like goodness and health and truth.
I repeat: Freud also saw we have at other times an opposite feeling which causes us to want to live in the dark—to not be around people, to shy away from life and the light and being seen and recognized and even to wanting to be lonely—that causes us to not care about fun, to hate and be angry, indeed to hate everyone and even to want to lash out at them for no reason other than what might be self-labeled as spite; that causes us to hate goodness, calling things “kumbaya moments,” that causes us to be jealous of others who are more giving and to hate them for that, call people “goody two-shoes” or saying something is “schmaltzy”; or saying that all that good stuff is just “drama”; and putting out terms like “bleeding heart” liberals; that causes us to beat up on our bodies and abuse them with all kinds of substances and behaviors; and that causes us to not care about the truth, but rather to say things instead to hurt, get revenge, to get back at; or to say untruths to get advantage, to disable our competitors, to hide from the evils we commit which enslave us further in the hiding of them, and so much more.
Pandavas versus Kauravas
Freud said we struggled between these two opposite feelings throughout our lives. It is because of this contradiction we carry inside that we can never be truly sure of who we are and even that we can question our motives and intentions (those more self-analytical of us). It is because of this contradiction that we can always feel we could have done better, that people don’t know everything about us, even when they say they do, and that sometimes we fear, especially when we are younger, that if people knew what we had inside they would shy away, not like us, think us to be bad, even monstrous.
By the Way, About That Inner Monster of Yours…
It is because of this contradiction that people are so terrified of revealing themselves, lest some of that not socially appropriate, not socially sanctioned, not socially approved part of themselves slip out. And the fear there is that then we will be seen to have been found out; and that then we will be confirmed in our worst fears that indeed that “other” part of ourselves is—the horror that cannot even be spoken in one’s mind—that dark part of ourselves is the real us…which carries with it the view that any of the “good” in us is just a cover up so that other people will not know.
Mask on a Monster, Lipstick on a Pig
But Freud took it beyond our inner struggles and talked about how the events of the world, the actions and movements of history, the dramas of all the ages, are in fact the products of this inner struggle. Desperate between these poles, we join together with others of the same feeling—whether of lightness or of negativity—in multiple relations and groups on both sides of that struggle. More than that, while driven unwittingly from sources on one side, we expend ourselves in complex ways, in concert with these other, to represent these groups as well as ourselves as acting out from sources on the other side; we mask ourselves as the other.
Babel’s Inner Blueprint
Ultimately, these groups magnify our powers. And the cumulative acts of many individuals, along with the actions of groups and their leaders, all within complex and contradictory motives at all levels and in every matter, create the complex events of all times. All these happenings are at base the story of inner conflicts—complex outer conflicts notwithstanding. In a cumulative manner and over time, things are ever more convoluted and twisted and complicated through the actions of the myriad characters—all of whom conflicted inside, act inconsistently, and out of their own unique struggles which have all of us perceiving and interpreting things in ways totally unique to ourselves.
Again, The Question
These huge world events, then, Freud laid at the feet of the individual struggle. Basically the world becomes an arena of the acting of the Will to Life against the Will to Death, of Eros versus Thanatos.
That is why I say what we are discussing is an age-old question. Although to our detriment…or fortune?…it is now more than any other time crucially relevant, and it is the most immense importance and consequence as to the winner of that inner struggle.
For while we watched with paralyzed hand on one side, on the other our lesser selves are presently taking us on a path that leads inevitably, one way or another, to total species extinction. And not just that alone, but in fact total life extinction on this planet, and possibly even to planetary annihilation—the destruction of this planet itself.
That is why in upcoming sections I focus on this question of dire importance. I talk more about this Will to Death manifesting currently as planetary suicide. But unlike Freud I do not address this Will to Death in a general sense. I deal specifically with its existence as an element of the current struggle between those of us who would live and those opposing that.
I deal with the question of the sway of the the “dark side” as over against the Power of Truth, Love, Higher Power; God…if you will; Sathya Sai, that is, Truth Love…if you will; the Universe; or simply the Better Angels of Our Nature manifesting in increasing numbers of lives….
The questions we need to ask are about which side will win in the end. For certainly it will be decided one way or the other, and soon, of that we can be sure. And that is what makes this time and this question different from any other time. Because this question is not an academic one, now. It is one whose answer will become known far sooner than we would ever wish.
So, we will continue to live, and we will become good citizens of this planet and our species will continue on?
True? False?
This discussion is only now beginning.
Strange Days, Indeed. “Most Peculiar, Mama!”
Beginning in the next chapter, “Strange Days,” we begin discussing this question of life-death, eros-thanatos, survival-extinction.
En-Raptured Reaction … to Pending Apocalypse: Death Wish of Zombies and Sad Proselytists
En-Raptured Reaction – Zombie, Sad Proselytist Death Wish
Zombie Apocalypse
People are becoming zombies in the face of their death, their own upcoming suffering, not to mention the death of all life on this planet. Do an internet search on apocalypse and note how little, if anything, is posted about the urgency or emergency of our current situation. It comes across as a big party on a South Pacific Island in a hotel that everyone there knows will not survive the incoming tsunami or killer hurricane. This is the most disturbing of any evidence I’ve seen supporting The Will to Die. [Footnote 1] [continued after video]
This is a reading, with elaboration, of this chapter. To hear this reading by the author, click on the link to youtube above or to the player below:
EnRaptured Reaction
False bravado—as described in the last chapter—is the most insane response to our predicament, with one exception: That is, what I’m hearing is a kind of euphoria and longing for the end of it all in evangelical groups who think of it as the Rapture—a kind of being freed from what is seen as an onerous Earth existence and the reward of the true life one thinks one deserves of ease, love, and happiness in heaven.
Now, is that not the most extreme form of reaction formation you have ever heard? These folks have developed an elaborate, comforting fantasy to escape the facts of their lives.
These “enraptured” people are the same ones who admit /claim they were the good little God- (parent-) fearing children who slavishly fawned upon the unreal wishes of their authoritarian parents—parents who themselves were real religious nutjob psychotics whose lived world was an imaginary one of hellishness and a stern bearded father god who makes you say, even think, that he is loving—despite being the most horrendously mean and more-than-murderous mythical figure ever concocted. [Footnote 2] [continued after video]
Click the audio player below or the link to youtube above.
Gotta Love ‘em, He’s the…Monster!
For this father “god” will not just punish by ending one’s life but will punish you in what has to be the most extreme kind of punishment ever to be imagined—being forced to live forever but every moment of it being in extreme pain and suffering.
And these folks have to somehow twist their brains into thinking this “god,” this monster, is actually loving rather than the obvious.
The parents bought that horrific view of the ultimate reality of it all; then their kids slavishly followed them in this insanity. Is it any wonder then that their wish is to be dead!? [Footnote 3] [continued after video]
To hear this audio performance, click on the link to youtube above or to the player below:
Reaction Formation…Leave It to humans!
So the reaction formation is that of creating the kind of life where, unlike their own childhood, they would be loved, cherished, seen, made to feel special, and so on. Most of all to be freed from the fear of punishment of the most extreme form imaginable. Leave it to humans to be so cut off from the reality of a loving God as to wish to be dead instead. For they have managed, with their imagination running loose and totally without even one lifeline to anything loving or nice—either in their own life’s experiences or in the mythology of reality they’ve been forced to accept—to come up with the most unimaginably horrible view of their lives, and its prospects.
But they’ll give you “breathing holes”!
One last reversal of reality, what Freud called reaction formation, is that—getting “breathing holes” this way, “thinking they are happy”—they call themselves “saved” and think it is their duty to go out and “save” everyone else in the world. [continued after video]
“Sad” by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Tribute to Kurt after his death version. Chilling. [Footnote 4, for the lyrics]
For, in the view of enraptured folks, others are suffering and miserable. Interestingly, this is similar to the way they view the “animal” world—our planetmates— and the World of Nature in general. [Footnote 5]
Also, others needing to be “saved” like them insinuates that their happiness—the state of being of the “enraptured”—is eminently superior to the experienced lives of all others.
The media enables these psychotics.
Now, isn’t it about time we stopped giving in to their pestering and stopped adding media credibility to their huge denial systems? For our sakes, yes, but for them as well. For this media credibility just aids them in their sickness, and their continued misery.
At any rate, we have here reaction formation and then reinforcement of it by the media. [Footnote 6] [continued after videos]
This is a reading, with elaboration, of this chapter. To hear this reading by the author, click on the link to youtube above or to the player below:
Sympathy for the Bedeviled: En-Raptured Proselytists’ Apocalyptic Death Wish
Apocalyptic Will to Die of the Sad Proselytists – Sympathy for the Bedeviled
So these sad proselytists know deep inside how miserable they are. But they find a way to stave off the realization of that reality and of its horrible roots in their suffering in childhood, through denying their unhappiness. They take up arms against their misery and engage in an endless battle trying desperately to believe (and unfortunately for us, assert) that the opposite is true: That is, that their experience is happy.
R.E.M. – “Shiny, Happy People”
Sad Proselytists
This sad insanity they impose on all and everyone. Of the actual pathetic nature of their lives they know intuitively but without letting themselves know it (like so much else of the facts of their reality).
Desperate Affirmations
They also know in their muscles that saying the lie out, and loudly, can help in reinforcing their precious untruths. For these dear fabrications, when heard coming from the outside — even if it is simply one’s own voice that one is hearing echoed back—have greater weight and credibility to them. When experienced existing in the outside world, they can be felt to be more real than when heard just in one’s own private thoughts alone. [Footnote 7]
This is another reason they need to have other people, and the media, echo it: It adds to the reality of these lies…the Big Lie repeated becomes more true…and boosts their defense against, and attacks on, the truth of their reality which asserts itself over and over—”truth will out”—during their life and increasingly more as they get older. This also explains their behavior’s increasing rigidity with time, as they get older.
If YOU accept that I’m better off than you, then I must be!
But simply proclaiming their blessed savedness out loud is not enough to be truly convincing over against the unhappiness that they actually feel every moment. So the big guns are brought out: Not only must they proclaim their happiness; they can PROVE it. This leads to their fantasy of engaging with the rest of the world in convincing all others that they are indeed less happy than they think they are and that that they need and want the “saving” the “enraptured” ones are offering.
The underlying rationale goes like this: If you could convince others in the world that you were happier than they are to the point where those others would all want to give up their lives and have your life instead, well, then that PROVES you are happy, or at least that what you have is the happiest existence possible. You’re the “winner” in life, essentially.
For if your reality wasn’t the better one, no one would choose it over their own…no one would decide to try to be like you rather than to be like themselves. Conversely, other people choosing to try to become like you, to accept your beliefs…to be “saved”…proves that your reality is the superior one (One Way!!). To such lengths do people go to deny their sad, unfortunate lives.
Inner lepers
If one could not see the tragedy of it for a moment, one would have quite a belly laugh, at their sake: Just this vision of inner lepers, convincing themselves that they are divinely gifted healers instead, going out to convince as many healthy people as possible that it is they who have leprosy and that they (the actual inner lepers proclaiming themselves spiritual healers) can cure them (of this disease that they don’t have) by the laying on of hands…or magical words repeated endlessly (endlessly…endlessly…endlessly….) and as loudly as possible.
Sympathy for the Bedeviled
You simply have to take a look at the lives described above and imagine those multitudes and the incredible pain, utter lovelessness, utterly miserable and confused minds they carry as adults.
Then think beyond them to the many-fold more of the masses who have similar but lesser versions of lives and experiences as the “enraptured.”
Add to that the incredible power of fear…not only fear; but fear that has, well, demonically, been projected into the biggest expanse existing in the universe—that of the imagination and that of the knowledge of the Unknown, combined.
A Mind That’s Squirming Like a Toad
If you can get a sense of that fear, even a small part, you will realize the utter terror that awakens them, that is there in the middle of the night as they approach consciousness, and which, like a squirming frog, inhabits, nay, becomes the daytime brain and thoughts of these people, and motivates them to do ANYTHING, anything at all, that might promise a snippet of relief from what is the reality they condemn others to.
You will see that they believe in hell because they in fact live lives that are the closest things in existence to actual hells. This is made that much worse, indeed, multiplied many-fold, by the idea implanted with it, which is that to acknowledge that truth will actually result in the imagined hell becoming reality…and that the only way they can save themselves from that hell is to, somehow, not be aware of their own reality as it is. So they must struggle mightily to not know what they indeed do know.
Now, try that burden on for size. And just be glad that you are not them. They exist within that nightmare reality; they see it portrayed before them. They have not even the respite, like watching a horror movie, of ever walking out of the theater and thinking, “Well, I’m glad that was only a movie.”
But the rest of us must confront their horrible realities as well. Sorry, you are not spared them. And you dare not take comfort in looking away from them either. For to deny that this is what they are doing is the same as denying the events of history that have resulted from these kinds of horrible existences: all the wars, killings, tortures, holocausts, purges, genocides, pogroms.
It is no coincidence that these sorry sorts are attracted to fantasies of denial, such as denying climate change, denying the Holocaust, denying the atrocities committed by religions or their own governments. In striving to be shiny, happy people they create inner hells and outer monsters. Not only hell do they create, but all the hellacious things on earth are the offspring of these lives. This includes the creation now of the ultimate evil that can be committed while in flesh—the killing of the planet and of all life on it.
The Cranberries–”Zombie”
Thanatos Walking Your Way
For another, final, take on insane or irrational reactions to the end of time and of all life on this planet, another example of the Will to Die, continue to the next chapter, “Chapter Five: Death Wish — Thanatos Walking.“
To hear this performance, click on the link to youtube above or to the player below:
4.These are the lyrics to “Sad” by Nirvana:
Rare song by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana titled “Sad” or “Verse Chorus Verse.” Also known as “Sappy.”
Lyrics:
And if you say your prayers
You will make God happy
And if you do what’s true\told
You will make me happy
I’ll keep you in a jar
And you will seem happy
I’ll give you breathing holes
You will think you’re happy, now
You’re really in a laundry room You’re really in a laundry room You’re really in a laundry room
And if you save yourself You will make Him happy He’ll bring you fine rewards Then you will feel happy I’ll keep you in my room I’m sure you’ll be happy And if you save your soul You will think you’re happy, now
You’re really in a laundry room You’re really in a laundry room You’re really in a laundry room You’re really in a laundry room
And if you kill yourself, You will make him happy
And if you save yourself Then you will make him happy
He’ll keep you in a jar And you’ll think you’re happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll cover you with grass And you’ll think you’re happy Now
You’re really in a laundry room,
You’re really in a laundry room The clues that came to you, oh….
And if you cut yourself You will think you’re happy He’ll keep you in a jar Then you’ll make him happy
He’ll give you breathing holes Then you’ll think you’re happy He’ll cover you with grass Then you’ll think you’re happy Now
You’re really in a laundry room, You’re really in a laundry room Conclusion came to you, oh….. (x2)
And if you fool yourself You will make him happy
He’ll keep you in a jar And you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll give you breathing holes Then you will seem happy You’ll wallow in your shit Then you’ll think you’re happy Now
You’re really in a laundry room (x3) Conclusion came to you, oh……
5. I just realized that I cannot call our planetmates “animals” anymore. It strikes me as being very much like using the N-word for African-Americans or the Q-word for Gays. For we all know that the word, animal, has connotations that are not positive, in fact they are derogatory and demeaning. The word is used as an insult. It does not connote the noble, esteemed but simply different, interesting nature of these conscious souls in relation to us, in truth.
Is it not time we all started referring to our differently embodied brothers and sisters, not as “animals,” but as planetmates—the ones who we are sharing this planet with, nothing more?
6. See also, in this regard, Fromm’s The Sane Society, Marx on religion as being the “opiate of the masses,” and Sigmund Freud’s writings of the role of religion in society as a defense mechanism.
7. It is significant that in The Lord of the Rings trilogy the power of the Ring, which signifies an all-encompassing untrue belief system that provides comfort, esteem, and well-being — thus an aspect of ego — the power of the Ring is magnified when it is used. This is equivalent to the assertion, saying out loud of one’s untruths, unrealities…the struggle to find external justification and reinforcement for one’s chosen psychotic reality and thus the active enslaving or imprisoning of oneself, in other words, becoming a Gollum.
Thanatos Walking, Part Four: The Only Important Question
and About That Inner Monster of Yours
I repeat: Freud established that we act out a will to live and to be in the sun and to have fun and to love and to like goodness and health and truth.
I repeat: Freud also saw we have at other times an opposite feeling which causes us to want to live in the dark—to not be around people, to shy away from life and the light and being seen and recognized and even to wanting to be lonely—that causes us to not care about fun, to hate and be angry, indeed to hate everyone and even to want to lash out at them for no reason other than what might be self-labeled as spite; that causes us to hate goodness, calling things “kumbaya moments,” that causes us to be jealous of others who are more giving and to hate them for that, call people “goody two-shoes” or saying something is “schmaltzy”; or saying that all that good stuff is just “drama”; and putting out terms like “bleeding heart” liberals; that causes us to beat up on our bodies and abuse them with all kinds of substances and behaviors; and that causes us to not care about the truth, but rather to say things instead to hurt, get revenge, to get back at; or to say untruths to get advantage, to disable our competitors, to hide from the evils we commit which enslave us further in the hiding of them, and so much more.[continued after video]
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Thanatos Walking/ Will to Die, Pt 2: Fleeing Freedom, Hating Goodness, Wanting Apocalypse
Pandavas versus Kauravas
Freud said we struggled between these two opposite feelings throughout our lives. It is because of this contradiction we carry inside that we can never be truly sure of who we are and even that we can question our motives and intentions (those more self-analytical of us). It is because of this contradiction that we can always feel we could have done better, that people don’t know everything about us, even when they say they do, and that sometimes we fear, especially when we are younger, that if people knew what we had inside they would shy away, not like us, think us to be bad, even monstrous.
By the way, about that inner monster of yours…
It is because of this contradiction that people are so terrified of revealing themselves, lest some of that not socially appropriate, not socially sanctioned, not socially approved part of themselves slip out. And the fear there is that then we will be seen to have been found out; and that then we will be confirmed in our worst fears that indeed that “other” part of ourselves is—the horror that cannot even be spoken in one’s mind—that dark part of ourselves is the real us…which carries with it the view that any of the “good” in us is just a cover up so that other people will not know.
Mask on a monster, lipstick on a pig
But Freud took it beyond our inner struggles and talked about how the events of the world, the actions and movements of history, the dramas of all the ages, are in fact the products of this inner struggle. Desperate between these poles, we join together with others of the same feeling—whether of lightness or of negativity—in multiple relations and groups on both sides of that struggle. More than that, while driven unwittingly from sources on one side, we expend ourselves in complex ways, in concert with these other, to represent these groups as well as ourselves as acting out from sources on the other side; we mask ourselves as the other.
Babel’s inner blueprint
Ultimately, these groups magnify our powers. And the cumulative acts of many individuals, along with the actions of groups and their leaders, all within complex and contradictory motives at all levels and in every matter, create the complex events of all times. All these happenings are at base the story of inner conflicts—complex outer conflicts notwithstanding. In a cumulative manner and over time, things are ever more convoluted and twisted and complicated through the actions of the myriad characters—all of whom conflicted inside, act inconsistently, and out of their own unique struggles which have all of us perceiving and interpreting things in ways totally unique to ourselves.
Again, The Question
These huge world events, then, Freud laid at the feet of the individual struggle. Basically the world becomes an arena of the acting of the Will to Life against the Will to Death, of Eros versus Thanatos.
That is why I say what we are discussing is an age-old question. Although to our detriment…or fortune?…it is now more than any other time crucially relevant, and it is the most immense importance and consequence as to the winner of that inner struggle.
For while we watched with paralyzed hand on one side, on the other our lesser selves are presently taking us on a path that leads inevitably, one way or another, to total species extinction. And not just that alone, but in fact total life extinction on this planet, and possibly even to planetary annihilation—the destruction of this planet itself.
That is why in upcoming sections I focus on this question of dire importance. I talk more about this Will to Death manifesting currently as planetary suicide. But unlike Freud I do not address this Will to Death in a general sense. I deal specifically with its existence as an element of the current struggle between those of us who would live and those opposing that.
I deal with the question of the sway of the the “dark side” as over against the Power of Truth, Love, Higher Power; God…if you will; Sathya Sai, that is, Truth Love…if you will; the Universe; or simply the Better Angels of Our Nature manifesting in increasing numbers of lives….
The questions we need to ask are about which side will win in the end. For certainly it will be decided one way or the other, and soon, of that we can be sure. And that is what makes this time and this question different from any other time. Because this question is not an academic one, now. It is one whose answer will become known far sooner than we would ever wish.
So, we will continue to live, and we will become good citizens of this planet and our species will continue on?
True? False?
This discussion is only now beginning.
Strange Days, Indeed. “Most Peculiar, Mama!”
Beginning in the next chapter, “Strange Days,” we begin discussing this question of life-death, eros-thanatos, survival-extinction.
Thanatos Walking, Part Three: “Quit Hitting Yourself!” and Sycophantic, Suicidal Ape
Sycophantic Ape
Skipping to the point here. People can be made to feel good about things of themselves they are not sure of.
How to Make Someone Love You: Tell Them Something Wonderful About Themselves They Normally Doubt Is True
They will feel good, because the thing they would want to believe, the thing that would make them see themselves positively, the thing that would feed their slanted bias toward themselves…. Ok, I’ll finally use the word: The thing that would prop up and feed a person’s “ego” or the belief in one’s goodness, superiority, and so on, in a world of so many others, well that makes one feel good, whether it is true or not.
So, we see that the intention of this pathetic public pronouncing of a superior human will to live is to salve the egos of the masses. Why does it feel good? Because it is universally true that the ego is in constant assault from something which makes it feel not good.
What is that thing that makes people feel not good about themselves, so that being told something that counters that would make them feel good? Well, the answers, by psychologists since Freud, have many terms attached to them. And by the way, before the psychologists there were the theologians attempting to answer this. But Freud’s analysis not only answered it, but put it in the largest context possible—one into which both psychologists and theologians would find an inroad.
We can say, to backtrack a bit, that this pandering by those in front of audiences makes people feel good because it supports the defense system that all humans have erected against the real truth—that zeitgeist-shattering one that Freud was first to fully explicate. It feels good because it supports the denial that all humans have against the real truth that they feel about themselves, one of the things that human societies universally consign to that black hole of the Unapproved and Hidden. [Footnote 1] [continued after video]
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the audio player here:
Thanatos Walking/ Will to Die, Pt 2: Fleeing Freedom, Hating Goodness, Wanting Apocalypse
“Quit Hitting Yourself!”
So this repetitive obvious truth about humans having a strong Will to Live is repeated to please audiences and make them feel good—”people-pleasing”—because it is a salve to the egos of the masses, which in reality are not merely bruised. No, this goes directly toward propping up a particular defense, a particular denial that we all carry. And that denial is that, IN TRUTH, humans don’t at all feel like they have a tremendous Will to Live. How can I say that? Well, how many things do you know you do which are “not good for you”? How many things do you not do which you know would aid the cause of our supposed universal desire to Live and to Live as long as possible?
The point is that humans, along with a Will to Life that is undeniable, also have a Will to Death.
How many times have you woken up, thought about all the pressures and obligations, or complexities, responsibilities…. thought about all the seemingly insurmountable obstacles or challenges that you are facing… thought about all the things that just have to get done, yet you feel that you could not possibly have the time to do all of them…. How many times have you woken up and felt overwhelmed with what life has become and not wished to just curl up, go back to sleep, and never wake up again? How many times have you taken to drugs or intoxicants in full knowledge of their negative and even dire concomitants and simply thought to yourself, “Aw, what the hell. If I were to die, so what? What’s so great about life anyway?” Or, with less clarity, simply said, “Well nobody lives forever!”
Do they sound like the pronouncements of a species that has a tremendous will to live? No, in fact, alongside our Will to Live, we have not only a Will to Die, but even a will to self-destruction.
Right about now, it might be occurring to you how this makes sense of so much, seemingly insane, human behavior we’ve seen of late. This Will to Die explains why we continue nonchalantly our march to armageddon. It shines light on how we can suck up air in cities that gives us raging allergies, clogs our lungs as bad as chronic smoking would, and will kill off the children we raise there long before their times. It reveals how we could drink poisoned water, blithely go about our business as the globe fills up with nuclear radiation and makes its way into our food supplies and as our government refuses even to test for it, and turn our backs as the oceans die, and killer tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis chalk up thousands in the kill column. It explains why people allow themselves to be enslaved and controlled by others—allowing fascism in established democracies—unconcernedly voting for rabid folk who would take away their rights and security and bring down their freedoms, health, and even lives, while watching those living under totalitarian systems risk their lives for a such freedom and rights and democracy. So much more.
But anyway….
Suicidal Ape
Now, the intention here is not to repeat all that Freud and psychologists have said in showing how this works. Besides, just look at the evidence around you of addiction, chronic accidentalism, unhealthy behavior habits without number, and of course the ultimate evidence: suicide.
And by the way, if we have such a strong Will to Live, superior to all other species, then explain why it is so that we are the only species that has suicide? And we’re supposed to be the conscious ones?
What Freud pointed out has tremendous explanatory power, especially now in our current worldwide financial upheaval, depression/recession, expanding global fascism, nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, near environmental collapse, wars and terrorism, nuclear armaments of planetary annihilation, and tendency to pollute body as well as environment, and even to do it thoughtlessly, in full knowledge of the consequences.
Thanatos Walking, Part Two: Dogma Barks Out Specialness
Well, Ain’t We Special?
Freud pointed out we have a Will to Live, too–nothing earth-shattering there. In fact, so far he is stating nothing more than the common-sensical beliefs of the masses. Indeed, it is the universally held mainstream near-definition of humans…one of those “obvious truths” about us we like to bless ourselves with. Freud’s first point, taken by itself, encapsulates the cliched view of What We Are—that what distinguishes our species above all others revolves around a superior Will to Life.
While common-sensical that our Will to Life is part of a species superiority of ours, it is wrong…going too far. For would anyone say that other species don’t also have an incredible Will To Live? [continued after video]
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the audio player here:
Not So Much
But this hyperbole or over-reaching in stating humans are unique in the degree of their Will to Life reinforces my point about Freud’s ideas being zeitgeist-shattering. For in this common, frequent, pervasive even universal, and nauseatingly repeated promulgation of supposedly the obvious, by any and all who speak before an audience—large or small, from a principal speaking in front of a gathering of high schoolers or a preacher before his gathering of church-goers to the TV media pundit before a world-wide audience, and even to a US President’s audience of even greater global reach—it is shown that our special Will to Life is not as true as is assumed. For if we had such a superior drive in us, would it need to be constantly reinforced and upheld, as if against some attack, or attacker? And if so, what is the feared attack or attacker?
And here we get a clue into Freud’s discovery and its utter undermining of all that which is normally said regarding our humanness. For regarding our being special in our Will to Live, this kind of “protesting too much” and its flip side of repeating it ad nauseum, as Shakespeare obviously saw points to a hidden agenda. Truths do not have to be repeated endlessly, mantram-like, even ritualistically. For they are self-evident and need as much propping up as the belief that the sky appears to be the color blue to us—and you don’t hear much about that, do you?
My Dogma Barks Out My Specialness
But the pervasive repetition of the supposed Truth of our species Will to Life—especially the blown-up version that has it being the thing that makes us human, different from other species, “superior” to other species (there’s a clue), and even “special” (clue. Getting it?)—points to its being, not so much truth as dogma. And dogma does need to be endlessly repeated in that such things are exactly about things that are not obvious truths.
In fact, this repetition of an obvious truth points to its being not true. In a previous post I showed how our “sad proselytists” have to say their untruths and unrealities out loud in order to buck up or reinforce their believability. So also human societies need to endlessly repeat, in order to reinforce against onslaughts of insight, their precious untruths.
But the reasons behind the promulgation of this supposed “obvious truth” go even beyond, since we are not dealing here with any conscious or acknowledged, let alone written and standardized, set of things not obvious. For indeed, in this sad repetition of our superior life-valuing, it is put out as being something not needing institutional backing, being simply true in its obviousness.
So what then? Well, this repetitive characterization of Us, as Humans, has all the indications of something that has an intention, however unconscious, that has a calculation, however desperate our desire to not see it, about it to achieve an effect on the audience—in this case—the masses of all humans.
Humans’ Uniqueness Among Species? We Suck Up
What is that pathetically overlooked intention? Well, let us take a look at what that effect might be.
Anytime you place our species above all others (true or not), you are making as much as anything else a play to butter up your audience of fellow humans and appeal to their vanity…and thus, making them feel good, hoping that they will feel good, or, like you in return. In commonspeak, that’s called “people-pleasing.” In the vernacular, it’s called “sucking up.”
OK, so we’ve established that people in front of audiences near-universally want to say things that will make their audience feel good towards them. No, not so fast. For that overlooks the fact that somehow…and get this; for if the spoken thing were of the obvious truth category, then why would this follow…that somehow all these people speaking out to others about the unique will to life they have know—somewhere inside them—that saying such a thing will, in fact, give people a good feeling. That’s another clue.
More Socratic Dialoguing
And again, continuing this Socratic dialogue, well, wouldn’t humans just, of course, feel good hearing about their being superior? Doesn’t everyone feel good when told they are better and such? Well, now we’re getting to where Freud took us. For he knew, as we all do if we simply think about it. The answer is “no, not necessarily or even usually.”
Think about it. If the Beatles were to be told they were a good band, would that give them a good feeling? No. certainly not. For that was so true as to be overwhelming and almost scary in its near-universal belief. And we can suppose that to them having that kind of power and influence because of their talent—especially when you come out of nowhere, from humble, unassuming backgrounds—may have been distressing to think about and hardly something wanted from others. How could they not wonder about this power, its source, where it would lead, and all that? I don’t think it happenchance that this success sent all of them into drug-taking—to both block it out as well as come to terms with it—into soul-searching of the spiritual and, especially John, of the therapeutic sort. Sometimes one does not want to be reminded of how “good” (and therefore powerful…therefore responsible) one is; there’s such a thing as feeling one is scary good.
Or take the obviously accomplished anybody, Pavarotti, say. Wanna tell Pavarotti he sings good? Don’t think he’d feel a thing.
But, you say, that’s because they hear that all the time.
Ok, granted that. But think about when it would have felt good to them. Look to your own experience and you realize that you feel good when people tell you things about yourself—especially when they state them as self-evident and obvious to all—about which you are not certain, about which you often or at least sometimes have doubts, and about which you are insecure! Look to your own life. Can anyone be flattered about the things they know to be without question? Can you be flattered about the color of your skin or hair, or about…. Well, not stated as a fact, you wouldn’t. A person would be flattered only if they had some bad feeling, insecurity in that area, first; and second, if that quality of them is not usually noted though it be assumed by everyone to be a good, positive, or “superior” thing.
This pervasive, mutual stroking we do has a result which is of dire consequence currently: We scapegoat our planetmates because of this pathetically low self-esteem and those who play on it.
Apocalypse Is How We Over-Achieve in Acting Out Our Will to Die:
Thanatos Walking, Part One
Freud showed we had a will to die…so — Will we survive? Will we wake up from global apathy to save our planet? Will we resist cowardly denial or die out like the dinosaurs?
Will We Survive?
This post discusses an age-old question which has currently become of immense, literally vital, importance: Will our species survive or die out like the dinosaurs? is the most crucial issue of our time. It is related to the fundamental fact of our existence for it is about the struggle between the forces of Life and those of Death. The consequences as to the winner of that inner struggle have to do with no less than the continued survival of life on this planet or total planetary collapse.
Eros vs. Thanatos
In the struggle between the current powers of life versus death, it is helpful to remember Freud’s paradigm-shifting observations about the human psyche on Eros and Thanatos. Freud showed how all human lives are drawn out against the background of each person’s inner struggle between the opposing forces of life and death…Eros and Thanatos. Specifically, for our purposes here, Freud advanced an understanding that made his insights paradigm-shifting, specifically, that each of us carry within us a Will to Die, which he referred to as Thanatos. [continued after video]
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the audio player here:
“Sometimes the lights are shining on me.”
Freud established that we act out a will to live and to be in the sun and to have fun and to love and to like goodness and health and truth.
“Other times I can barely see.”
Freud also saw that we have at other times an opposite feeling that causes us to want to live in the dark; to not be around people; to shy away from life and the light and being seen and recognized and even to wanting to be lonely. This feeling causes us to not care about fun, to hate and be angry, indeed to hate everyone and even to want to lash out at them for no reason other than what might be self-labeled as spite. It makes us jealous of those who find happiness or pleasure in their lives and impels us to lash out at them and make them suffer the way we, on the inside, know we do. Because of this self-defeating tendency we irrationally beat up on our own bodies as well and abuse them with all kinds of substances and behaviors.
Thanatos is why there are always Republicans or something like them — Pharisees, Inquisitors…
And times in which they hold sway—stifling, life- and creativity-averse, stagnant and little changing times: the Middle Ages, for example…
This downward pull makes us want to hate goodness, calling things “kumbaya moments.” This part of our nature causes us to be jealous of others who are more giving and to hate them for that, to call people “goody two-shoes” or say something is “schmaltzy,” or to be saying that all that good stuff is just “drama.” It has us putting out terms like “bleeding heart” liberals. It causes us to not care about the truth, but rather to say things instead to hurt, get revenge, to get back at. Or it has us say untruths to get advantage, to disable our competitors, to hide from the evils we commit which enslave us further in the hiding of them, and so much more.
Struggle Will Out
But Freud took it beyond our inner struggles and talked about how the events of the world, the actions and movements of history, and the dramas of all the ages are in fact the products of this inner struggle.
At this very moment, our lesser selves are taking us on a path that leads inevitably, one way or another, to total species extinction. But not just that, being the “overachieving” species we are, we are bringing total life extinction to this planet and possibly even planetary annihilation–the death of virtually all life on this Earth.
Apocalyptic Will to Die of the Sad Proselytists – Sympathy for the Bedeviled
So these sad proselytists know deep inside how miserable they are. But they find a way to stave off the realization of that reality and of its horrible roots in their suffering in childhood, through denying their unhappiness. They take up arms against their misery and engage in an endless battle trying desperately to believe (and unfortunately for us, assert) that the opposite is true: That is, that their experience is happy.
R.E.M. – “Shiny, Happy People”
Sad Proselytists
This sad insanity they impose on all and everyone. Of the actual pathetic nature of their lives they know intuitively but without letting themselves know it (like so much else of the facts of their reality). [continued after video]
For the reading of this post, with elaboration, by the author, click on the link to youtube above or to the player below:
Desperate Affirmations
They also know in their muscles that saying the lie out, and loudly, can help in reinforcing their precious untruths. For these dear fabrications, when heard coming from the outside—even if it is simply one’s own voice that one is hearing echoed back—have greater weight and credibility to them. When experienced existing in the outside world, they can be felt to be more real than when heard just in one’s own private thoughts alone. [Footnote 1]
This is another reason they need to have other people, and the media, echo it: It adds to the reality of these lies…the Big Lie repeated becomes more true…and boosts their defense against, and attacks on, the truth of their reality which asserts itself over and over—”truth will out”—during their life and increasingly more as they get older. This also explains their behavior’s increasing rigidity with time, as they get older.
If YOU accept that I’m better off than you, then I must be!
But simply proclaiming their blessed savedness out loud is not enough to be truly convincing over against the unhappiness that they actually feel every moment. So the big guns are brought out: Not only must they proclaim their happiness; they can PROVE it. This leads to their fantasy of engaging with the rest of the world in convincing all others that they are indeed less happy than they think they are and that that they need and want the “saving” the “enraptured” ones are offering.
The underlying rationale goes like this: If you could convince others in the world that you were happier than they are to the point where those others would all want to give up their lives and have your life instead, well, then that PROVES you are happy, or at least that what you have is the happiest existence possible.
For if your reality wasn’t the better one, no one would choose it over their own…no one would decide to try to be like you rather than to be like themselves. Conversely, other people choosing to try to become like you, to accept your beliefs…to be “saved”…proves that your reality is the superior one (One Way!!). To such lengths do people go to deny their sad, unfortunate lives.
Inner lepers
If one could not see the tragedy of it for a moment, one would have quite a belly laugh, at their sake: Just this vision of inner lepers, convincing themselves that they are divinely gifted healers instead, going out to convince as many healthy people as possible that it is they who have leprosy and that they (the actual inner lepers proclaiming themselves spiritual healers) can cure them (of this disease that they don’t have) by the intimate laying on of hands.
Sympathy for the Bedeviled
You simply have to take a look at the lives described above and imagine those multitudes and the incredible pain, utter lovelessness, utterly miserable and confused minds they carry as adults.
Then think beyond them to the many-fold more of the masses who have similar but lesser versions of lives and experiences as the “enraptured.”
Add to that the incredible power of fear…not only fear; but fear that has, well, demonically, been projected into the biggest expanse existing in the universe—that of the imagination and that of the knowledge of the Unknown, combined.
A Mind That’s Squirming Like a Toad
If you can get a sense of that fear, even a small part, you will realize the utter terror that awakens them, that is there in the middle of the night as they approach consciousness, and which, like a squirming frog, inhabits, nay, becomes the daytime brain and thoughts of these people, and motivates them to do ANYTHING, anything at all, that might promise a snippet of relief from what is the reality they condemn others to.
You will see that they believe in hell because they in fact live lives that are the closest things in existence to actual hells. This is made that much worse, indeed, multiplied many-fold, by the idea implanted with it, which is that to acknowledge that truth will actually result in the imagined hell becoming reality…and that the only way they can save themselves from that hell is to, somehow, not be aware of their own reality as it is. So they must struggle mightily to not know what they indeed do know.
Now, try that burden on for size. And just be glad that you are not them. They exist within that nightmare reality; they see it portrayed before them. They have not even the respite, like watching a horror movie, of ever walking out of the theater and thinking, “Well, I’m glad that was only a movie.”
But the rest of us must confront their horrible realities as well. Sorry, you are not spared them. And you dare not take comfort in the denials of them as well. For to deny these truths is the same as denying the events of history that have resulted from these kinds of horrible existences: all the wars, killings, tortures, holocausts, purges, genocides, pogroms.
It is no coincidence that these sorry sorts are attracted to fantasies of denial, such as denying climate change, denying the Holocaust, denying the atrocities committed by religions or their own governments. In striving to be shiny, happy people they create inner hells and outer monsters. Not only hell do they create, but all the hellacious things on earth are the offspring of these lives. This includes the creation now of the ultimate evil that can be committed while in flesh—the killing of the planet and of all life on it.
This is a reading, with elaboration, of this and the previous post together. To hear this reading by the author, click on the link to youtube above or to the player below:
Footnote
1. It is significant that in The Lord of the Rings trilogy the power of the Ring, which signifies an all-encompassing untrue belief system that provides comfort, esteem, and well-being—thus an aspect of ego (see my article on the meaning of the Ring, which is posted on my Primal Spirit site)—the power of the Ring is magnified when it is used. This is equivalent to the assertion, saying out loud of one’s untruths, unrealities…the struggle to find external justification and reinforcement for one’s chosen psychotic reality and thus the active enslaving or imprisoning of oneself, in other words, becoming a Gollum.
This is a reading, with elaboration, of this and the previous post together. To hear this reading by the author, click on the link to youtube above or to the player below:
Culture War is Class War disguised. The Wealthy Elite–the "Filthy Rich"–foment Culture War in society to distract and cover their real economic motives. Culture War, Class War explores the resulting cultural divide–how it was instigated and kept alive for fifty years in America by certain elite powers and how and why they choose to benefit while tearing families in two and keeping America paralyzed.
But in previous chapters, especially 
So the next thing to be addressed is how we might change our fortunes and live. Since continuing on is not just of matter of deciding it—voting “like” on it or checking its box—as we saw in 
In the struggle between the current powers of life versus death, it is helpful to remember Freud’s paradigm-shifting observations about the human psyche on Eros and Thanatos. Freud showed how all human lives are drawn out against the background of each person’s inner struggle between the opposing forces of life and death…Eros and Thanatos. Specifically, for our purposes here, Freud advanced an understanding that made his insights paradigm-shifting, specifically, that each of us carry within us a Will to Die, which he referred to as Thanatos. [continued after video] 
This downward pull makes us want to hate goodness, calling things “kumbaya moments.” 
This part of our nature causes us to be jealous of others who are more giving and to hate them for that, to call people “goody two-shoes” or say something is “schmaltzy,” or to be saying that all that good stuff is just “drama.”
This downward pull makes us want to hate goodness, calling things “kumbaya moments.” 
This part of our nature causes us to be jealous of others who are more giving and to hate them for that, to call people “goody two-shoes” or say something is “schmaltzy,” or to be saying that all that good stuff is just “drama.”
Culture War, Class War 