More coming. Nobody beats Reich when it comes to figuring out the character psychopathy of politics.
The individual character neurotic, crushed as he is by society, suffers from crippling himself; he does not usually inflict this damage on others. Therefore, one has a great deal of sympathy and compassion for him. The socio-political character also is sick, but insists on inflicting the effects of his illness on his environment by restricting and regimenting it. One understands his condition but has little tolerance for its destructiveness when it prevents others from leading satisfying lives and, in certain instances, has caused mass murders and the destruction of entire nations.
Baker, Elsworth F.. Man in the Trap (Page 189). American College of Orgonomy Press. Kindle Edition
The first socio-political pattern is what Reich termed the
emotional plague. It is the necessity of certain individuals, instead of
working out their own problems, to set themselves up as the standards of
normality and to make their environment, and everyone in it, conform to their
own inadequacy.
The plague character as such develops where a high energy level
is combined with an insuperable pelvic block. However, most people have some
emotional plague in them; we are familiar enough with the unfeeling mother who
cannot stand healthy functioning and proceeds to mold her infant in her own
image. Cruelty, criminality, nasty gossip, resentment of other's good fortune,
all are examples of plague behavior, behavior not just unhealthy , but
destructive of the health of others. We can say that to the degree that an
individual tries to tear down other people or control their lives, he is
functioning as a plague character.
Baker, Elsworth F.. Man in the Trap (Page 190). American College of Orgonomy Press. Kindle Edition.
Defense against feeling may be one of two types, although
both may occur in the same individual: 1) muscular contraction, where contact
with the core is not lost, but sensations from it are diminished or distorted,
and 2) an intellectual defense where the individual largely or wholly succeeds
in losing contact with the core, enabling him to live primarily in the
superficial layer of his structure. It must be remembered that this is not
primarily a matter of intellectual capacity or intelligence, but rather the use
of such capacity as a defense in meeting the anxieties of life. This is a later
or more sophisticated means of defense than muscular armoring. Except for the few healthy individuals, mankind may be roughly divided into these two types; that is, those who live an intellectual rather than a feeling life, and those who still maintain contact, whether true or distorted, with their basic feelings and are to a great extent ruled by them. Few are pure examples, but the vast majority belong predominantly to one group or the other. I call the two types the liberal and the conservative. In their simplest form, both are legitimate attitudes toward the world and, when represented by equal numbers, they offer a good balance in social and governmental progress. Exaggerations and distortions of either attitude bring social and political chaos.
Baker, Elsworth F.. Man in the Trap (Page 190). American College of Orgonomy Press. Kindle Edition.
The basic characteristics of the liberal are a tendency to
intellectualism, mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena, and a
collectivistic attitude toward social living. The conservative, on the other
hand, tends toward a feeling attitude toward life, a mystical explanation of
natural phenomena, and a selectivistic attitude toward social living.
Baker, Elsworth F.. Man in the Trap (Page 191). American College of Orgonomy Press. Kindle Edition.
Schematically, we can say that these are armored attitudes
sitting to the right and left of the healthy or natural way of functioning. The
closer to center, the nearer they approach rationality. The further they
deviate, the more irrational they become, bringing in bias and distortion to
defend themselves against natural living and functioning, which terrifies them.
Exaggerations of the liberal are what I term the modern liberal, socialist, and
communist, while exaggerations of the conservative are the extreme
conservative, reactionary, and fascist.
Baker, Elsworth F.. Man in the Trap (Page 191). American College of Orgonomy Press. Kindle Edition.
The quote below is from The White Goddess. Would you like a major touchstone, a spiritual pebble, to turn over and over again in the hands of your meditation on the tragic aspects of the Modern World?
Well..here you have it:
Though the West is still nominally Christian, we have come to be governed, in practice, by the unholy triumdivate (triumvirate of deities) of Pluto, god of wealth, Apollo, god of science, and Mercury, god of thieves.
To make matters worse, dissension and jealousy rage openly between these three, with Mercury and Pluto black-guarding each other, while Apollo wields the atomic bomb as if it were a thunderbolt; for since the Age of Reason was heralded by his eighteenth century philosophers, he has seated himself on the vacant throne of Zeus (temporarily indisposed) as Triumdival Regent. -page 476, The White Goddess.
What does that mean? Well, too much to put down in one simple blog entry, but I will try. First, a little back story on Robert Graves.
I can't remember when I first heard of Robert Graves, but I do remember the first time I heard of The White Goddess. The term itself refers to the moon, originally, in so-called "matriarchal" cultures, considered more potent than the sun. Women, of course, with their monthly menstrual cycles, are embodiments of "moon power", as it were.
It was in Colin Wilson's book, The Occult. Wilson recounts an amazing tale of how Graves solved some major mystery regarding Celtic rhyme and alphabet (the "tree alphabet") regarding the "White Goddess"..the moon goddess, the original highest power in the pantheon of human worship, back in the time of "true matriarchy", when the Unconscious ruled the psyche, not man's pathetic but tough little ego... It's a book for lovers of the Divine Feminine... I further came to know Robert Graves and his work because of the broadcast of "I, Claudius", a fictional back-story, remarkably well done, of the intrigue behind the actual facts of the first Roman emperors from Augustus, nephew of Julius Caesar, through Tiberius, to Caligula, and onto Claudius, the emperor seized by the Praetorian Guard to sit on the throne after the assassination of the psychopath Caligula... Now, back to that quote: Essentially, Graves is saying that the missing element of the modern world is an overall integrator, a principle of mediation capable of limiting essential activities such as commerce and science to what serves life and not simply its self at the expense, detriment, and possible undoing, of life overall. You see it well demonstrated in the story of Persephone. Hades needs a wife. He was a loser in the original assignment of areas of power, as his more powerful brother Zeus got the Heavens, while his brother Neptune got the Seas. His place, under the ground, the source of gold and other valuable material, is the reason Hades' other name is "Pluto", "the rich one", but, being a Land of the Dead, hardly entices any female to be his consort. So, he emerges from the ground with his black stallions and abducts Persephone, taking her underground to be the Queen of the Dead. Ceres, her mother, the Goddess of grain and plant life, in her grief, loses the will to live. Without her love plants do not grow and animals die, and there are no sacrifices by thankful humans to help keep the Gods alive. (Check out "Clash of the Titans" for this as well.) For the ancient pagans, the gods needed our love to sustain them. For the nuns who taught me in elementary school, God "liked" hearing that we loved him, but he wasn't in any particular need, especially an existential need, to experience our love. Zeus intervenes at the behest of his sister Ceres/Demeter realizing the situation will destroy them all. He demands his brother return Persephone. Hades concedes. While Hades allows Persephone to return to the upper world, he doesn't give up. Instead, he plans a feast to help her celebrate her return to her mother. Having been told not to eat or drink anything while below the ground, Persephone eschews the drink and food, but, forgetting (?) she eats a few pomegranate seeds. Her return is a joyful event for Ceres. Hades, however, isn't done yet and reappears, reclaiming Persephone based on her having eaten the seeds. The idea is that, having consumed the food of the dead, her spirit is now part of the "Land of the Dead", ie, Hades, and she has to return. This would mean, once again, the end of life on Earth, and, once again, the end of the Gods who thrive on the appreciation in the sacrifices offered to them for the food that kept people alive. Zeus, the mediator, resolves that Persephone must be shared. She will have to return to Hades every Fall, as the sun goes lower in the sky, before the Winter Solstice, and spend one month under the ground for ever seed eaten. But, she will return at the Equinox, beginning of Spring, in "April", the month named for the opening of the ground..."aprire", in Latin, to open. In the Fall, as the night lengthens, a trend that, if continued, would mean doom, Persephone returns to the Land of the Dead, and denizens of that Land come out into the world, hence, the celebration of Halloween, a celebration of the Dead that got subsumed under Christianity as "All Saints Day" and, especially, as "All Souls Day". Zeus has saved the day, literally. His job as mediator: well done. Zeus' position is that all claims that are legitimate are to be honored but...and it's a very important "BUT"...without being inimical to the very existence of the system that they seek to exploit. Now try applying that insight to our present-day world, looking for the necessary and beneficial compromise on any issue, you will experience attacks often enough by both sides because, if anything defines today's world, the "activist" mentality is totally devoted to the deification of whatever principle he eschews. Capitalism, that is, Big Business in general, personal freedom as it becomes radical libertarianism (more properly, "libertinism"), science, especially when it comes to experimentation on the fetus, or even our agricultural practices, all of these and many more constitute areas where a "Zeus" is needed to put those three gods in their place as SERVANTS of life, not as life's OWNERS. More to come....
This is an email I sent to The Occidental Observer. I must compliment @The_Rebbe_ , thanking him for the feeling that I am not alone in this approach to understanding nationalism and group ID. Without his input and our exchanges, I would not have published this.
My E-Mail to The Occidental Observer.
I do appreciate your articles here, but I thought I would make my comment known through an email for reasons you might easily imagine. I am doing research into the New School and I have found Culture of Critique very interesting. I think, Dr. MacDonald, you do need a theory of evil, so to speak, to be conjoined with your extroverted analysis of group behavior.
I will deal with that in a blog, but in the meantime, I believe I have insight into why nationalism of any sort fails all too often at this juncture in history.
I see references to" white nationalism" all the time here and elsewhere as I come to try to acquaint myself with the body of knowledge and beliefs in this area.
Nationalism fails today, white or otherwise, because most of the advanced nations of the world are populated by individuals whose capability for leadership is hampered by their being betwixt and between on the course between collectivism and true individualism.
Nationalism fails today because it is still necessarily collectivist. Collectivism involves projecting your own Self onto leaders who, in a very real sense, own your psyche. Collectivists are the "co-dependents" of the leader who offers a pseudo- and semi-solution to the very incomplete, wounded and sometimes malicious spirits who are his followers.
I come at this from my own experience of essentially a conversion phenomenon as I emerged from atheism during the isolation phase of primal therapy. I know well that many readers here (at Occidental Observer) seem to have an automatic dislike of Janov because he's Jewish, but I can tell you that this therapy can be helpful in actually developing individualism, especially with men and their wounded masculinity. Janov is anti-circumcision, by the way, hardly a view of traditional Judaism.
But, the main element that got activated in the isolation was connected to Carl Jung and his teachings, not Arthur Janov.
The developmental course has lasted over decades, but I don't want to get into that now. What I want to say is that if you want to construct a movement that would preserve and protect European-derived people and their culture from being extinguished, then you have to get behind an understanding of the point of view of Carl Jung, and I would add, of Gurdjieff and Joseph Campbell. Robert Graves and Wolfgang Pauli are also part of this.
The short version of Carl Jung's point of view, the essentials of the "alchemy", goes like this:
First: you must find the center of the psyche outside of the ego. This is the beginning of yielding the power of the ego back to the self, what Jung deems the divine within.
Second: you must begin to integrate the elements of the Self that were previously proscribed by the group, usually by the parents who were the funnels of group value.
Third: as you complete a kind of 360° view of yourself, to proceed, you must understand your own bad side to end the projection of your own shadow onto others.
Fourth: you undergo rebirth with a new kind of ego construct which is derived from the Self, your own version of the God Mercury or a manifest Christ, a person capable of conscious suffering, of bearing the burden of being his real self.
(Essentially, you can now live under the aegis of the feeling function. This "feeling" is not sentimentality, and is the outward projection of the body as sensation conjoined with the mind as thought. It is truly an expression of "soul".)
This is called the First Marriage.
The Second Marriage happens in middle-age and is a marriage of this remade, resubordinate ego with the anima, to create, once again, another derivation from the unconscious that has a similar function as Mercury or Christ. You would be "self-overcome", and not just. You are able to understand the flow and flux of the world, having a sense of your own development and why particular challenges and strife seem to head your way.
Essentially what socialization does is remove the spontaneous, natural and necessary connection of the ego to the greater psyche which gave birth to it. This severs thought/interpretation from sensation and wounds the feeling-function, affecting all relationships without and within the psyche.
Jung describes this very well in Memories, Dreams, Reflections while reacting to his conversation with a Pueblo Indian, realizing how Romanization destroyed the Celts as whole humans.
All inclusion in groups of any consequence involves a kind of wounding that corresponds to the wounding of the god Vulcan, a wounding that guarantees that the wounded individual will not leave the group with his skill and technique so as to be of value to the enemy.
In that sense, collectivism is a divination of the group, for which reason the leader must necessarily be considered divine. The Latin word for king, the “Rex”, indicated that he did the “reckoning” for the group and then you obeyed. We see the power of this projection in the killing of anyone in (eg) who cast a shadow on the Hawaiian kings of old.
After your connection to what Carlos Castaneda called “the link to the spirit” is severed, then, and only then, are you recognized and appreciated as a member of the group.
Group psychology is then designed to create mores that sustain the self-esteem of both the group and the individuals which comprise it. In other words, rationale is created that diminishes the group's possible negative view of itself, while accentuating the bad side of other groups.
Once an individual, through his own evolution within, or better yet, under the aegis of the unconscious and the Self, sees beyond the group mentality, he must, to some extent, become an enemy of the group, and if the group is organized, then he's an enemy of the state, a great term that all of you know was invented by Lenin.
So, what to do?
Work on your own self and your own individuation and become a source of knowledge and support for the similar-minded. Only when a certain critical mass is achieved can societal norms and institutions undergo failure, be extinguished and reformed by truly conscious individuals with true charisma.
Faith Goldy, the Canadian journalist formerly of Rebel.TV, has a couple of interesting tweets in her time-line regarding the elite's attitude toward immigration, their capacity to escape the negative effects thereof.
I don't disagree, but I have to say that this aspect of the problem is secondary.
The real problem lies in the nature of today's elite in a Nietzschean post-Christian world, not that it was so different in the Christian world, by the way.
So, what is the problem?
The elite, and I have seen this personally, very much seem to enjoy, even crave, the type of adulation, of "Pater Familias"- Godfather-like regard that people of traditional cultures often have of the "Signors"who are their employers.
There is no need for the elite to recognize their help, their employees, as equals in the most human sense of the word. They have no need to bow before them, as God demanded of Satan in that old tale from the Talmud. Their "subordinated" won't demand recognition of the Divinity breathed into them.
Contrast this with Americans of long-standing: they have the traditional informality de Toqueville commented upon, noting that Americans addressed their bosses by their first names and often referred to themselves as "assistants".
(Maybe that is why the housekeeper in "Two-and-a Half Men" is a sarcastic white woman, with a veritable "white trash" background. "Maria" would not act that way, and you can believe that the vast majority of housekeepers in Santa Monica are not white.)
Further, this exaltation is part of the secularized world.
Without recourse to traditional religion's capacity to get you out of your egocentric point of view, and, with a society that largely denies the existence, meaning and value of soul, social standing becomes an "uber alles" of considerable force.
And, the elite are not about to be denied their "rights" to a deal economically and avoid having to bow before the fellow citizens who may not be so accommodating.
No conscience. No "differentiated feeling function". An anti-nationalist point of view. Exaltation.
This came about thanks to Rachel at @alamobasya who got into a back-and-forth with me over the soul..and the part in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" where soul is described as not existing "ab inizio as in orthodox Christianity"...
If the "soul does not exist ab inizio" and has to be brought into existence by "sustained self-observation", what does that "sustained self-observation" look like?
"Self-remembering" is what that is called in "Esoteric Christianity". It can be described as "conscious self-consciousness"...the second term being my own attempt to succinctly describe what takes some real effort to learn, to understand and to practice...
While doing primal therapy with a group of men and women who had broken away from Janov, a friend of long-standing came to visit me with his other very close friend...
His close friend had been reading Tertium Organum by Ouspensky...he, in fact, ended up getting a Ph.D. in Intellectual History, and, apart from this interest in Ouspensky, was oriented toward Marxism. (Ah! But not for long...)
But, as synchonicity would have it, they ended up talking to a group of people who had an "esoteric school" in the Mission District in San Francisco. They were pupils of a man I won't name right now...were invited to come see a play and join this "esoteric school".
The school was called "The Everyman Theater"...another great coincidence for me.
I had heard about this play, "Everyman", when still in Catholic school. One Monday, in the Quaker school I attended from sixth grade on, for our school assembly, a group put on the play, "Everyman", and I got to see the whole thing acted out..
I was no longer a believer, but I have to say I really appreciated the opportunity to see this Morality Play with its "instructions" for "Everyman" as to how to get to heaven...
Anyway, my friend and his best friend ended up joining the rather expensive school and studying Gurdjieff's teachings (best chronicled by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous...hence the coincidence)....and me?
I went to an introductory meeting and apparently was so obnoxious and off-putting that I got kicked out of it...In a few months, my friends quit. The leader of that school had, in fact, a terrible reputation...(and more on that later).
I remember the moment I got "it"...self-remembering...and it was not the first time I had run across the term. In fact, it may have been the third time.
I definitely remember reading about it in the book, The Master Game, just after I had dropped out of school.
I didn't understand it then...and I think that the second time I read about it was in the Ouspensky book while sitting in the Shambala bookstore on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley...
But, this third time, I got it...and I remember going up the street self-remembering...amazed at this new piece of psychological practice....and I began using it.
Basically, what I understood was that I had to choose, as it were, to become self-conscious, and, in that moment, I had to resolve to maintain that state. I was able to. I saw I was in a new state of consciousness.
Self-remembering intensified all my "primals"...the re-experiencing of childhood trauma with the added aspect of a full emotional "feeling" reaction to them...the kind you could never have had then...
I did eventually break through to the shocking/disconcerting view of my own warts-and-all self, as others saw me. Not pleasant at all. More on that at another time...
So, below, if interested, I have collected some of the primary quotes from Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous...and, if you are interested, you might be able to induce it in yourself....
Warning...only one person I have ever explained self-remembering to was able to get it on the first take...I needed three takes..and, sadly, one of my friends, while instrumental in getting me to this experience...never got to this at all...more on that another time as well...
So, interested in "self-remembering"? ....read away!
"Consciousness is considered to be indefinable," I said, "and indeed, how can it be defined if it is an inner quality? With the ordinary means at our disposal it is impossible to prove the presence of consciousness in another man. We know it only in ourselves." "All this is rubbish," said G., "the usual scientific sophistry. It is time you got rid of it. Only one thing is true in what you have said: that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it. And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards. I mean that when it comes again you can see that it has been absent a long time, and you can find or remember the moment when it disappeared and when it reappeared. You can also define the moments when you are nearer to consciousness and further away from consciousness. But by observing in yourself the appearance and the disappearance of consciousness you will inevitably see one fact which you neither see nor acknowledge now, and that is that moments of consciousness are very short and are separated by long intervals of completely unconscious, mechanical working of the machine. You will then see that you can think, feel, act speak, work, without being conscious of it. And if you learn to see in yourselves the moments of consciousness and the long periods of mechanicalness, you will as infallibly see in other people when they are conscious of what they are doing and when they are not.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2563-2574). . Kindle Edition.
"Your principal mistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness, and in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality consciousness is a property which is continually changing. Now it is present, now it is not present. And there are different degrees and different levels of consciousness. Both consciousness and the different degrees of consciousness must be understood in oneself by sensation, by taste. No definitions can help you in this case and no definitions are possible so long as you do not understand what you have to define. And science and philosophy cannot define consciousness because they want to define it where it does not exist. It is necessary to distinguish consciousness from the possibility of consciousness. We have-only the possibility of consciousness and rare flashes of it. Therefore we cannot define what consciousness is."
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2574-2580). . Kindle Edition.
On one occasion at the beginning of a meeting G. put a question to which all those present had to answer in turn. The question was; "What is the most important thing that we notice during self-observation?" Some of those present said that during attempts at self-observation, what they had felt particularly strongly was an incessant flow of thoughts which they had found impossible to stop. Others spoke of the difficulty of distinguishing the work of one center from the work of another. I had evidently not altogether understood the question, or I answered my own thoughts, because I said that what struck me most was the connectedness of one thing with another in the system, the wholeness of the system, as if it were an "organism," and the entirely new significance of the word to know which included not only the idea of knowing this thing or that, but the connection between this thing and everything else. G. was obviously dissatisfied with our replies. I had already begun to understand him in such circumstances and I saw that he expected from us indications of something definite that we had either missed or failed to understand.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2583-2591). . Kindle Edition.
"Not one of you has noticed the most important thing that I have pointed out to you," he said. "That is to say, not one of you has noticed that you do not remember yourselves." (He gave particular emphasis to these words.)
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2592-2593). . Kindle Edition.
"You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves. With you, 'it observes' just as 'it speaks' 'it thinks,' 'it laughs.' You do not feel: I observe, I notice, I see. Everything still 'is noticed,' 'is seen.' ... In order really to observe oneself one must first of all remember oneself" (He again emphasized these words.) "Try to remember yourselves when you observe yourselves and later on tell me the results. Only those results will have any value that are accompanied by self-remembering. Otherwise you yourselves do not exist in your observations. In which case what are all your observations worth?"
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2593-2597). . Kindle Edition.
These words of G.' s made me think a great deal. It seemed to me at once that they were the key to what he had said before about consciousness. But I decided to draw no conclusions whatever, but to try to remember myself while observing myself. The very first attempts showed me how difficult it was. Attempts at self-remembering failed to give any results except to show me that in actual fact we never remember ourselves. "What else do you want?" said G. "This is a very important realization. People who know this" (he emphasized these words) "already know a great deal. The whole trouble is that nobody knows it. If you ask a man whether he can remember himself, he will of course answer that he can. If you tell him that he cannot remember himself, he will either be angry with you, or he will think you an utter fool. The whole of life is based on this, the whole of human existence, the whole of human blindness. If a man really knows that he cannot remember himself, he is already near to the understanding of his being."
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2598-2606). . Kindle Edition.
But before making deductions, I will try to describe my attempts to remember myself. ' The first impression was that attempts to remember myself or to be conscious of myself, to say to myself, I am walking, I am doing, and continually to feel this I, stopped thought. When I was feeling I, I could neither think nor speak; even sensations became dimmed. Also, one could only remember oneself in this way for a very short time.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2608-2611). . Kindle Edition.
This last realization enabled me to come to a certain, possibly a very incomplete, definition of "self-remembering," which nevertheless proved to be very useful in practice. I am speaking of the division of attention which is the characteristic feature of self-remembering. I represented it to myself in the following way: When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe: a line with one arrowhead: I ------> the observed phenomenon. When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the line: I <------> the observed phenomenon. Having defined this I saw that the problem consisted in directing attention on oneself without weakening or obliterating the attention directed on something else. Moreover this "something else" could as well be within me as outside me. The very first attempts at such a division of attention showed me its possibility. At the same time I saw two things clearly. In the first place I saw that self-remembering resulting from this method had nothing in common with "self-feeling," or "self-analysis." It was a new and very interesting state with a strangely familiar flavor. And secondly I realized that moments of self-remembering do occur in life, although rarely. Only the deliberate production of these moments created the sensation of novelty. Actually I had been familiar with them from early childhood.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2616-2631). . Kindle Edition.
They came either in new and unexpected surroundings, in a new place, among new people while traveling, for instance, when suddenly one looks about one and says: How strange! I and in this place; or in very emotional moments, in moments of danger, in moments when it is necessary to keep one's head, when one hears one's own voice and sees and observes oneself from the outside. Sometimes self-remembering was not successful; at other times it was accompanied by curious observations. I was once walking along the Liteiny towards the Nevsky, and in spite of all my efforts I was unable to keep my attention on self-remembering. The noise, movement, everything distracted me. Every minute I lost the thread of attention, found it again, and then lost it again. At last I felt a kind of ridiculous irritation with myself and I turned into the street on the left having firmly decided to keep my attention on the fact that I would remember myself at least for some time, at any rate until I reached the following street. I reached the Nadejdinskaya without losing the thread of attention except, perhaps, for short moments. Then I again turned towards the Nevsky realizing that, in quiet streets, it was easier for me not to lose the line of thought and wishing therefore to test myself in more noisy streets. I reached the Nevsky still remembering myself, and was already beginning to experience the strange emotional state of inner peace and confidence which comes after great efforts of this kind. Just round the corner on the Nevsky was a tobacconist's shop where they made my cigarettes. Still remembering myself I thought I would call there and order some cigarettes. Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep. At the same time, while immersed in this sleep, I had continued to perform consistent and expedient actions. I left the tobacconist, called at my Hat in the Liteiny, telephoned to the printers. I wrote two letters.Then again I went out of the house. I walked on the left side of the Nevsky up to the Gostinoy Dvor intending to go to the Offitzerskaya. Then I had changed my mind as it was getting late. I had taken an izvostchik and was driving to the Kavalergardskaya to my printers. And on the way while driving along the Tavricheskaya I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something. And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2631-2667). . Kindle Edition.
More links on the way..wanted to get it out there...this election will determine if we address the coming econ horror show or if we just continue on and over the cliff....
The problem is
really rather simple.
If the United States
federal government cannot pay its bills, the United States federal government
will cease to exist, not just as a functioning entity, but eventually as
anything of meaning at all.
It would undo the very basis of our functioning as a nation-state...from my first blog...it would be totally, totally nefasto...subversive evil.
Consider for a
second what it would mean that the
federal government had diminished capacity to hand out Medicare, Medicaid,
Social Security checks, food stamp cards, let alone pay the bills for the
federal court system, the federal prison system, the United States military,
the pensions and salaries of the federal government employees, and all the rest.
Imagine food stamp
recipients receiving 20% less in purchasing power…somebody would go hungry.
Imagine hospitals and pharmaceutical companies being paid late or with
insufficient funds trying to maintain their supply chain to produce needed
pharmaceuticals.
The US would be a giant version of the Naples bus system that a few years ago, having not paid its bills for quite some time, had no fuel...and the buses couldn't go out....and, I've got a story about the water supply there as well.
Didn't think I would ever have to compare the mighty US to what is essentially a city run along third-world lines such as Naples...but I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
A crippling blow to
the functioning of United States federal government would not necessarily need
a dollar that had no purchasing power whatsoever. The crippling blow would only
need a substantial reduction that shredded the supply chain for services and
product essential to keeping the US running as a nation-state.
There are two ways
for this to come about. Both are not merely highly likely but virtually
unavoidable.
The first way
involves the role of United States dollar as a reserve currency and the second
involves the capacity of United States government to pay its interest payments
on its debt.
Let's start with the
first way: the role of United States dollar as a reserve currency.
What does
that mean?
It means that
America's dollars are not just used domestically but are used internationally
as the vehicle of exchange whenever a foreign country buys or sells something from another country.
They change their money into dollars and then change the dollars into the
currency of the second country.
Why do they do that?
They do that because
it is impossible to run foreign-exchange markets that constantly compare every
currency with every other currency. Therefore governments exchange their money
for dollars in every transaction that is international.
As a result of that,
there is an enormous amount of dollars floating around the world doing the job
as this intermediary currency. It makes the dollar more valuable, and it makes
our exports more expensive as a result, while making imports cheaper, making it harder to grow our US economy and get the tax dollars to pay our bills.
When the major trading
countries of the world succeed in making the dollar
relatively unnecessary for international exchange, the United States dollar will lose
its reserve currency status. We will then lose about 20% of our purchasing power
because the demand for dollars will go down. People will sell them into a market that needs fewer of them.
The United Kingdom has a currency called the pound.
This currency was the international reserve currency until it began losing that
role in the 60s and finally lost the role completely by the mid-70s.
As a result of that,
the pound lost 20% of its value, and the UK was thrown into economic chaos.
It got so bad that
the UK government could not pay bills for the medical system. When you went to the
hospital in England, you had to take along your own lunch and your own dinner
and sometimes your own bed sheets. Too often, there weren't any.
Our government would
have to raise taxes but it wouldn't be able to.
Why not?
If the government
raised taxes, it would choke the economy further. The loss of 20% of purchasing
power would affect every industry and every corporation and consumer making
them instantly poorer.
The economy would
shrink rapidly and raising taxes would be absolutely impossible. The government
would not also be able to print more money. Or, it could but to no avail.
We will get to an explanation of this in the subsequent blogs, but our government doesn't
actually print money. Our Federal Reserve Bank, a privately held bank, not
owned by our government, prints our money.
The Federal Reserve
Bank can only print so much money without endangering itself as a financial
institution and they can only buy so much of our debt and we will go into that
in a subsequent blog.
The second scenario
involves the destruction of the dollar through simple incapacity to pay the
interest on our debt.
Even during the
Clinton years, US federal government accumulated $1 trillion of debt. It was
about 100 billion and little more per year. From Bush through Obama, the debt
has gone up, in essence, astronomically.
The Federal Reserve
bank, as I mentioned above, now buys our debt (called "quantitative easing"). This means that it prints out
money and takes in our debt.
If the Fed didn't do that, then the amount of
interest we would have to offer to get our debt purchased on the world credit
market would be much higher.
That would mean that all interest paid for money
on loan in America, for example bank deposits, would go up quite a bit. In the
'70s, when the Federal Reserve raised the rates on loans, banks offered
interest on deposits of more than 5%...even 6 to 7%. Treasury bills, the actual
promissary note of the US gov, offered 10%.
With interest rates
that high, our economy would crash because no one could afford to do business
as we have been doing. The dollar would increase in value in an economic
scenario known as deflation. It would mean that dollars were worth more and goods
worth less.
The price of houses
would go down, but would be less affordable because of the high interest rates
on mortgages. The actual mortgage payment would go up. When you went to sell
your house, the house would be "under water", meaning worth less than
the mortgage that allowed you to purchase it in the first place.
Banks would become
insolvent. The backbone, the essential institutions permitting our economy to
function, would be ripped up. Think of 2008.
If and when, not
that far away, the US federal government can no longer pay the interest on its debt,
then the dollar itself will be refused as currency. The dollar will be seen as funny
money, internationally for sure, and even nationally.
So now, having
alerted you to the grim reality of impending doom regarding our dollar, the
lifeblood of our economic system, we will now go over and begin to look at some
of the basic concepts of free trade and free market and understand how they've
been misused to allow this crisis scenario to develop.
