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 every 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.
America is going
bankrupt…not technically, but functionally, which is just as bad. (See here,
here,
here,
and here.)
And one of the causes is Free Trade, or what passes for Free Trade…what is
actually Faux Free Trade.
So, there it is…Free Trade, one of the hottest topics going around. (Well, it was until the race
turned into Hillary's attacks on Trump's "misogyny" while deflecting
her problem with her email.)
OK, no…it died rather quickly. I guarantee you it died
because the elites wanted it to die. They are the ones who profit the most from
this fake or Faux Free Trade… Read about Corporatism vs Capitalism in The Matrix Exposed.
Free Trade is an
article of faith in our business class, and anyone who tries to touch their
version of free trade is some kind of demonic populist bent on destroying
American business and international trade as well. (Great
example with Trump as target.)
Free Trade, even (unbelievably!) the terrible Faux Free version we have, has been incorrectly assumed to be some kind of panacea for the world's economic problems, and it's also
incorrectly assumed that what we have going now with nations such as Japan,
South Korea, and especially China, is "free trade". We will get to that.
Beyond that, the "free traders" believe that the founder of modern economic theory, Adam Smith, was a "free trader". The Authentic Adam Smith says
differently….(page 7)…
"A close reading of The Wealth of Nations and other good
evidence
shows that Adam Smith was no doctrinaire free trader.
He approves certain monopolies and restraints on trade,
export subsidies and restrictions, sumptuary laws, penal taxation, limits on the
rate of interest and the issue of bank notes, compulsory qualifications for
craftsmen, the pressing of merchant sailors and discrimination against
Roman Catholics.
He was expert at exploiting the system of nepotism then dominant in the administrations of Britain, India
and North America.
He believed that government should be involved not only in
educating but in entertaining the public. The words laisser faire or
laissez faire appear nowhere in his work. Though he deplored British
commercial policy in Ireland,
the Americas and India, he
thought the solution was
not independence for those countries, but federation with
the mother country."
What I'm going to do in these blogs is try to give some basic but thorough economic lessons to people who might feel that these concepts are too challenging and abstract for them. I wish to make it possible for you to counter those arguments and have a sense of what you want as a citizen with a stake in the future of our country.
I maintain that what
many of us have intuitively felt…that so-called"free trade" is
neither "free" nor "fair"… have had it right all along. (Has
the US turned against Free Trade?)
Further, the only
reason these concepts are too challenging and too abstract is because the
experts prefer it that way. You can study various societies and you will find
even in primitive tribes that there is an elite in the tribe that has control
of, let's say, medicine or the healing arts.
Even under these
extremely primitive conditions, anthropologists have noted that the medicine
men construct an arcane vocabulary and set of concepts to keep their knowledge
essentially to the in-group.
So, when you go
on-line and you look up these concepts, as I've done recently, you'll come away
confused and befuddled.
Worse, the experts
get things very, very wrong.
Remember the crash
in 2008? Peter Schiff was laughed at on the Neil Cavuto show on Fox Business
because he said that the stock market was going to crash. He was not alone in
this prediction, and some people made hundreds of millions of dollars going
against the conventional wisdom concerning the mortgage industry and United
States.
In 1989 everyone saw Japan as about to rise to be the number one economic power in the world. They had all of the top 10 banks in the world. Within one year the Japanese
economy crashed, and it has never really recovered. Four of the banks died. No Japanese bank remained among the top 10.
Yet, when I studied
it, I was teaching ESL in Milan Italy. Discussing it with bankers and others, anyone could see there was no big mystery behind the collapse. The bubbles were easily predicted
and you could account for everything that happened. (We will get to that in re Export-driven Econ Model.)
What you can't
account for is the fact that everybody missed the analysis, the obvious
prediction, the signs of danger, and let it go on until everything burst.
So not only do they
keep this information and knowledge to themselves, they misuse it to make a ton of
money, (often- too often- even way too often), at the expense of not only the
American people but of the foundations of our society and nation-state.
Francis
Ford Coppola's film, "The Godfather", provides a great opportunity to
examine the relationship between Americanization and individuation.
Essentially
Michael is on his way to Americanization and would have had the possibility of
a real individuation had he avoided assuming the role of his father as
godfather.
Michael
Corleone makes a big deal to Kay of not being the man his
father was. He tells the story of a young Italian-American singer who could not escape
from a bad contract with a bandleader. He introduces the phrase "make an
offer you can't refuse" to describe the way that, when the Godfather was
unsuccessful the first day in getting his godson released from the contract, his father went back with Luca Brazzi, and told the bandleader that "either your
brains or your signature is going to be on that contract"- and got the singer released.
N.B.: Many think it's a story about Frank Sinatra. Based on a similar incident, but, actually, Frank Sinatra got out of his contract with the help of a musician union leader. Sinatra's story was plagiarized and re-written, as it were, but too many have assumed it was the truth.
He gets
sucked into the role of the Godfather through the emotional attachment to his
father during the duress of the aftermath of the attempted assassination, and
all of that "Americanization" and potential individuation is put
aside.
The beginning of the shift is well
symbolized by Michael Corleone in a telephone booth with Kay Adams shut out, on
the outside, feeling helpless as he calls home to find out if his father is
still alive, having seen the newspaper headline about the assassination attempt on his father.
Without
real ambition, but merely as an extension of things he felt and closely held,
i.e. the love of family, he becomes a potential heir to his father. While
sitting in what is essentially a throne, as the camera focuses in on him, he proposes the assassination of Solozzo and his police captain bodyguard., which he then carries out with his brother's and Mafia captains' blessings.
Escaping
to Sicily, Michael Corleone renounces, in essence, his engagement to Kay Adams
and marries a young Sicilian woman.
At this
point, you'd have to say that Michael Corleone had reconstituted the energy of
his family line, what is called in 19th century racial theory, the
"Kultur", of the Sicilian Mafia family.
Michael
Corleone's new Sicilian wife is killed, in a car-bombing, and he returns to America and eventually
goes back with Kay Adams who still loves him.
While
promising to escape his role as the Godfather, subsequent events, his own emotional life,
his own lack of insight as to what his father really was, keep him in that role
far longer and therefore in a more
damaging way than he ever could have imagined.
At the end
of the Godfather II, he has a telling conversation with his mother, played by Morgana King, where he expresses fear of losing his family in
Italian. (Really a conversation with his Unconscious, with a great collective
mother-figure, a kind of seeress, at that moment, which is why the conversation is in Italian, something that evokes a sense of being outside of parochial time)...
She
assures him that he cannot lose his family. If that were only the truth....
As the
truth about his role as the Godfather comes out near the end of Godfather II,
Kay Adams realizes what kind of man she's been married to, the degree of the
promises not kept, that he is truly the very man that Michael's sister condemned with harsh
words for the murder of her husband and others at the end of Godfather I.
Ah,
yes…the great scene where Michael Corleone lies to Kay, giving her the
opportunity to just ask one question "just this once" regarding his business. He
assures her that he had nothing to do with the death of his brother-in-law, a
complete lie. She beams back at him, totally content.
But, with
all of the information that Kay now has, she leaves him, and Michael Corleone ends
up all alone, his soul shattered and betrayed, without his wife, the American, even without his own brother that he had had killed.
Kay
represents that loss of soul, the loss of relationship to conscience and real
values, the kind he was on the verge of adopting as he broke away from his
family in an act of rebellion, signing up for the US military to fight in World
War II.
In fact,
Michael Corleone had used Kay Adams for comfort, to assuage his conscience, and
exploited her as he has exploited the American way of life. Yes, Michael cared for her, but entirely on his own terms. Returning from Sicily, he's essentially an emissary of death, surrounded in his dark cave with the plutocrats of the underworld. She doesn't see this...he doesn't see it, either.
The art direction in this masterpiece of cinema is full of indications, a message system in itself as to what is really going on.
I am not sure to what extent Coppola did all of this consciously. Would be a great interview....
Individuation
is never that easy. That is, becoming a true individual is counter to nature, evolution that goes upstream, wrenching from inside you every bit of available energy and then some. You are taken up, possessed, with a total examination of what you're
actually about, what your values are and why you do things.
That is the self-overcoming of Nietzsche.
The thing
that Michael Corleone couldn't do was see that the man who loved him and that
he loved dearly was essentially evil outside of the family. Because the evil
happened outside of the family, they couldn't see it and they couldn't feel it
and this permitted him to move into the role that he should've avoided as if it
were the plague, a plague of the soul.
This brief blog is dedicated to Melissa ( @MelissaJaneSays ) who has raised really good points about the war on the feminine conducted by Christianity and the West and by the Catholic Church, in particular.
What I'm trying to do here is create perspective on the process of how the masculine has overridden the feminine by going back in time before the Catholic Church existed so as to demonstrate that the tendency is an existential tendency that's an unfortunate and apparently necessary part of our past, and not simply particular to the Catholic Church.
The first, the most archetypal, theft of the role of the feminine by the masculine occurred in ancient Greece when the cattle-driving men and women from Turkey invaded Greece, conquered it, and made slaves of the indigenous population.
According to some historians, and notably, Robert Graves, the ancient indigenous Greeks didn't understand that sex made babies, or, the women understood it, but they refused to share the knowledge with men. So the women were held in thrall by men who didn't understand that they were the co-creationists of children. The women had a kind of absolute power.
They were an agricultural population who worshiped Hera (name derive from Erith, Earth?), and other goddesses in local cults, the local version of Hera.
The rites of Hera involved the sacrifice of the queen's consort every spring, his entombment and his replacement/resurrection with a new consort for a year. The bodies of the men who were sacrificed were probably eaten by priestesses and their blood scattered on the fields where the nitrogen in the blood helped increase the production of food, validating the whole notion of what they were doing, ie returning sacred blood to be used again.
The sacrificed consorts became Hera's sons and were considered heroes, derived from her name.
A side note: as a boy I always wondered how Hercules could be the son of Zeus. It turns out that Hercules means "little one of Hera", and it's obvious here that the masculine took over what had been traditionally the power of the feminine by changing his parentage to Zeus, a further disrespect of the Feminine.
The cattle drivers knew that sex made babies because they could not possibly take care of a herd of cattle without coming to understand that sex and procreation were connected.
The conquest of the then "Hellenes", the indigenous people of Greece, who became the "Helots", the slaves that served the upper class, brought about a re-dimension of the power of the feminine.
The conquest itself, and the end of the myth of women as divine creatures who give birth to children by themselves without the assistance of men, ended women's essential monopoly on power, especially spiritual power.
Lest you think that this is a conjecture that's way out in left field, I will point out that in the early 1970s in a remote Chinese mountain area, the locals didn't know that sex made babies. Brother and sister raised the children of the female while both of them pursued what would we would consider a very freewheeling sexual lifestyle. This is the original clan model. All members of the clan, all the"kin", were descended from the first brother-sister pair directly from Mother.
In traditional culture, and in Jewish culture until recently, the child could only be a member of the clan if the mother was a member of the clan. This is because the body of the child was considered identical to the body of the mother. So, it seems to be a kind of universally-held notion.
As the men took over ancient Greece, they did not throw out the rites of the then dominant female society but rather took on the role of the priestesses- but with some odd twists.
The men dressed in the robes of the female, donning her breastplates, her wigs, and the double-sided ax, which was a symbol of the waxing and waning moon. The moon in a feminine culture is considered the more important deity in comparison with the sun. The moon is capable of blocking out the sun. Women's menstrual periods are so named because they go in synchrony with the moon, an obvious miracle, as it were.
Zeus, who had been a rather unimportant semi-divine creature previously, now became a major player. His followers, the priests of his rite, went around Greece making deals with all local sites of worship for control.
For Robert Graves, this is the original reason that Hera was "jealous". He means that Hera was jealous because the priestesses of Hera wanted control of all of Greece and its rites, whereas Zeus's followers took over each cult, making deals with the local goddess, with force, ie "rape of Europa".
This whole sacrifice of the prince consort every year was a kind of grand mimicry of nature, which I like to compare to the people on stage at "Rocky Horror Picture Show" who imitated everything that was on screen.
The earth, which is the energy of the Mother, (the Latin mater, which becomes matter), goes through a life cycle like a woman. In the spring the earth is like a child, which becomes like a full woman with the bloom of the trees (May as in "Maya" and June as in "Juno") and gradually goes "gray" as the leaves turn brown and then undergoes a kind of death.
However, everything that shot up out of the ground was considered a son of the mother, a kind of Mercury, a messenger from the earth goddess, a servant and protector. (Even Isaac Newton had such an idea.)
The sacrifice of the queen's prince consort represented the ancient Greeks' understanding of the relationship of the masculine and feminine.
The queen gets to live because she is reborn of herself, but the son of the mother is reborn in the spring out of Hera. The royal couple had to mimic that relationship. So the king was killed and entombed ("returned to womb/tomb") and the new prince walked out representing that renewed plant life of the spring.
Sounds like something re Christianity?
Yes, it certainly does. If the Christians got the myth of rebirth of Jesus from somewhere, that somewhere was everywhere in the Mediterranean where aspects of the original feminine culture lived on.
I'm not saying that I know whether Jesus rose from the dead or not. I'm just explaining some of the pagan origins of the attraction of the myth, whether the event was true or false.
Over time, the queens became more attached to their temporary consorts and looked for a way out of the sacrifice of the prince. Joseph Campbell has a wonderful passage in one of his books where the story is told of how the delay of the sacrifice of the prince worked out under the distraction of an excellent court story teller, so that he's allowed to live.
Accommodations came about over time. Example: they would depose the prince/king for a day, appoint what was called an "Interrex". He would be sacrificed and the old king would come out as the new king and everyone was happy.
The interrex might be a prisoner, and, then, eventually, animals were used. The story of Abraham and Isaac probably came out of a similar change in the view of human sacrifice.
Catholic priests to this day wear what is essentially a dress that goes all the way back to that event where the priests of Zeus took over the rites of Hera and dressed like her priestesses. I remember in kindergarten looking at the priests and wondering why they dressed in dresses and I remember the nuns talking about it.
Yes, it really does make an impression. Gee, that and how come we have a May procession in May and honor the Virgin Mary and all? Goes right back to Matriarchal times...and the beauty contest was the contest to crown someone the representative of the Divine Feminine.
So, this is a great example of how cultural shifts occur under trauma and stress and under a change in the psychological balance brought about by conquest and the knowledge that sex makes babies and that men are partly gods themselves, as are women.
(In another blog, I will look at how the Egyptians lost their feminine God for a God who masturbates the world into existence.)
It all shows that as the left-brain grew in dominance, everything in the rest of the psyche, outside the conscious ego, got assigned to an increasingly distrusted unconscious that could not be counted on to support the power structure of the leading families and of the men who led them.
A "new" feminine arose to help out: one of the undoubted reasons that Athena got created out of previous goddesses is because the upper-class elite women began to have a disposition which favored the elite men...and the needed a myth to accommodate the new goddess...Athena as the true daughter of her father, Zeus.
A quick explanation.
Zeus took an ancient Greek goddess called Metis and, for some reason or other, swallowed her. Robert Graves said that this represented the fact that her rites got subsumed under the priesthood of Zeus. However Metis is a goddess and she really didn't die after being swallowed by Zeus. She continued to be a voice that spoke to him from his belly, his solar plexus, and probably represents two things:
The first would be that the high priestesses of Metis continued to play a role that was important in advising the new priests of Zeus as to what was what in the community...
The second would be that as men shifted to a head-based culture based on command and words, the kind that the American Indian Hopis (?) talked about with Jung in his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, there still remained that need for what today is called "gut instinct".
In the solar plexus we have a connection to the lower half of the body which ends up representing the other half of the psyche outside of the conscious ego.
But, as a result of that union of a traditional Earth mother cult and the new patriarchal Zeus cult, a new kind of feminine was born from the head of Zeus. That new kind of feminine was Athena.
Nowadays Jungian psychologists call the women in corporate offices "Daughters of Athena".
Coco Chanel invented the entire look for the corporate woman. Instead of all that fluffy exaggerated feminine stuff of the past, Coco Chanel, abandoned by her father and raised as an orphan, took the military cloths, the uniforms of her lovers and reworked them into a suit she could wear. Voila! The Chanel suit was born.
So let's get it.
The feminine has been through all kinds of changes in all periods of history, mostly denigrated, but now about to undergo her own re-birth, I maintain, as the masculine overreach has gone on long enough and a re-balancing seems to be manifesting. (Another post.)
It must be pointed out that what has constituted the "new feminine" of today politically and culturally is just the old feminine of Athena, now demanding to be the actual leader, and embodied in the candidacy of an ex-First Lady, almost as if a Greek myth were being acted out in a play....
...hence the terms "collective unconscious"...and "archetypes"...
