My instinct is to stop writing about politics, history or anything else that seems outside of the official Narrative that people appear desperate to cling to. While I can bring people other perspectives, really, it's very hard for people to see things my way. It's like asking people to get in a sailboat that they don't know how to sail (sailing takes time and experience to learn) and expect them to manage a sea voyage. I realize now it isn't an issue of believing what I say or not believing. I remember when I provided two people with advanced degrees from two elite universities with proofs that the official 9/11 story was false both told me, separately, something to the effect of the following: "even if what you say was true I would refuse to believe it." I thought this was just something to put in the "overeducated fool" category but it has nothing to do with that. We live on the basis of mythology not fact. Our society has accepted the notion that science, logic, reason and open inquiry ought to be our preferred method of understanding the world but this point of view is not actually used perhaps because that's not how human beings function.
Rationality is an approach to life that is useful to our ability to handle our environment, evaluate threats, plan for the future and have a reasonably accurate view of our surroundings as well as accomplish our tasks whatever they may be. But beyond that rationality seems to collapse. Rationality, to the extent it is present in us is limited to our conscious mind and that is only the tip of the iceberg of our being. Science and human inquiry have proven the existence of an unconscious that while invisible to us most of the time has a major and even critical role in our lives. The unconscious provides most of our motivation or lack thereof. We are unconsciously sexually attracted to certain people and to certain physical and emotional attributes in others. Our unconscious holds our urges that just seem to come over us. Most people when they watch or read or hear commercials rarely consciously decide to buy a product or service based on what they saw. They usually ignore it yet, the size and income of the advertising industry proves that they know something else is at work. Commercials often seem silly or meaningless but that's only because most effective commercials are engineered to manipulate the unconscious of whatever demographic they are aiming their products to. Generally, commercials associate any deep fear, fascination, urge even that the conscious mind reject to manipulate people particularly those who are highly suggestive, that is, those who can be easily hypnotized. Our magic media whether it is TV or videos online put people into a mild trance so that whatever is suggested has some psychic power behind it. We will get a good feeling when we pick up a product that has been advertised but not remember anything about any commercial--we just buy it believing we have done something good even if the product is toxic, as most, say, food products that come out of the food industry are. On the one hand we know that these sodas we drink harm us on the other hand we get a good feeling when we pick up the soda with the magic logo. Advertisers are experts, even magicians, in being able to quickly strike to the heart of people. They must be very hip to what people are going through at this particular historical moment and have to have an overall understanding of what motivates people, how the psyche is constructed and, above all, the content of most people's mythological framework. The public-relations industry and the media propaganda organs all use similar methods to manipulate public opinion.
Jung divided up the unconscious into three parts, the individual, collective, and universal unconscious. The individual unconscious has to do with experience, urges, ideas, that we have consciously rejected because we realized that in navigating the world these inner preferences urges, fetishes, traumas would weigh us down so we just drop them. The ego that dominates life is necessary to our survival but it must be constructed. When we come up out of the sleep/dream state we boot up our ego and reconstruct our identities with our ongoing narrative. We do it every day very quickly so we don't notice it. The juice, the power however resides in the personal unconscious this is where our spontaneous emotions, desires, goals and so forth are generated. The ego uses the power of these emotions to fuel its structure as it attempts to fulfill these wants and desires which is its job. In certain forms of meditation we are trained to observe as thought arise out of the unconscious and can begin to sense the force behind these thoughts, urges, fantasies.
The second part of our unconscious is our identity with the collective. To be precise that means our family, our culture, our country, our civilization and, to some extent, humanity as a whole. This area contains true mythology or the intellectual framework we are born into we instinctively accept these myths, on the one side, those who believe in the Bible as a guide to life and guns as necessary tools, on the other, those who were brought as atheists in a fairly permissive and cosmopolitan view of life and all the myths surrounding those particular points of view. Also, we have here all the deeper archetypes, the hero, he damsel in distress, the fairy tales, the gods and goddesses of various mythologies that have force and are displayed, today, in fantasy movies particularly super-hero movies pre-figured, particularly, in the great epics of various civilizations.
Third, is the area where we, as individuals, connect with all that is. Here are the great spiritual traditions that emphasize our interdependence with the universe and transcendent realms where words no longer have great meaning where we approach the highest level of consciousness through a "cloud of unknowing." Here we go beyond both consciousness and unconsciousness this is where we find Faith and the Kingdom of Heaven, in the Christian sense, Samadhi, in the Yogic philosophy and Nirvana in the Buddhist sense.
These parts of the unconscious are intertwined--there are no boundaries where one starts and the other begins. Our deepest longings and fears are personal, social, and come from a wordless profundity we each can connect with. In order to have some rule-of-thumb we each construct some kind of mythological framework that might be our own ego-narrative but will be formed within the context of a cultural framework which can override even personal considerations. This explains, for example, heroism in battle or other sorts of self-sacrifice. In a sense within every desire, urge, and fear lies a depth our current set of mythological frameworks have not been able to grasp. In former eras when religion was more influential the frameworks were clear cut. Religion itself is an expression of these frameworks and its rituals connect us to those larger frameworks and, unlike today, don't ask us to have to either reject the deeper areas of consciousness (even if they are unconscious), or have to find our own way through a dizzying variety of world-views, spiritual practices and so on.
Because we lack strong mythological/religious structures since all of them are challenged by other structures that we can't avoid noticing (our ancestors who simply were not exposed to a lot of alternatives) we cling to any ad hoc combination of fragments. Thus we are vulnerable, more than at any time in our past, to any highly sophisticate mind-control regime like those in advertising, public-relations, propaganda and the panoply of cults, religions, gurus, lifestyle cults involving sex, fantasy, sports, gaming, obsession with politics and so on). Any of this could be the focus of our lives or we could have several of these structures in our lives--we can go to church on Sunday, play games during the week and obsess about Donald Trump the rest of the time along with eating, sleeping and making love with our partner. This keeps us internally fragmented and contributes to the growth of anxiety, depression and addiction. In the case of addiction, we solve the problem of fragmentation by focusing on a central occupation--feeding our addiction which becomes our religion. It has the advantage of immediate gratification, is deeply physical usually, provides us with a good feeling, and frees us from all the concerns that most people share.
With the contemporary world mediated by technology, drugs and a variety of urges, addiction, compulsions and a lack of an agreed upon way of looking at the world we become not just exhausted trying to navigate through life without a reliable compass we also have difficulty connecting to others. What if we reveal to other people what we really think and feel? Thus, in polite society, unless we are with people who exactly share our point of view, we are uncomfortable--but even then, if we are among Christians, we may have a very different approach to scripture and the church and some of these differences can be very sharp so the more we rely on our particular view the more threatened we are with those who don't view things the same way. If I believe the Bible is literally true in every way and another Christian tell me that can't be because of the contradictions in the Bible both factual and ethical then I'm threatened--I depend on that book to order my life--if I start doubting passages then where is the end of it? Our egos, who are tasked with helping us survive not just as organisms but socially because society is not an option--we require it to live unless, like religious hermits we've connected with the universal unconscious and made in conscious in our lives, we have transcended that need.
Mythology, it turns out is King and its mate the Queen of the sciences is theology. Theology is not only the study of God are the gods but a study of the universal unconscious. This study is much neglected and, in my view, explains many of the ills of our culture. It is deeper and more important than philosophy, it's younger sister, because it goes deeper. Philosophy uses intellectual power to create a mythological framework rather than the blend of emotional and intellectual power. Theology represents the unity of mind and heart that philosophy can and often does point towards. Whether we like it or not mythological frameworks that involve both head and heart are a requirement--we all live by them. Our current situation is that these frameworks are ungainly pastiches and promote, even by denying the spiritual world, anxiety and conflict. We need these pastiches and so cling to them often desperately. Maybe we'll suddenly jump to another set of priorities. Maybe our religious ideas will lead us to jump to focus on sex or our sexual lives will suddenly cause us to jump full steam into religion. Whatever it is it not very rational--it is rational only in the sense that it meets needs and the ego requires survival no matter how ungainly the structure.
This brings me back to our political/tribal/cultural struggle now magnified by the very strange and distorted lens of the Trump era. Donald Trump, a fixture in the culture as an colorful and eccentric real-estate developer who displays a combination of oafishness, narcissism, sentimentality, and a sort of honesty seen in reality TV has, no matter what happens in the next few years, already changed the course of US history. It has deeply sharpened political and cultural differences to a near fever pitch. His one policies and views are a strange pastiche that reflects our own pastiche-frameworks. There has never been a time I have experienced or read about in US history when both polite society (the upper-middle class), the communications media, and the governing establishment has been so opposed to a President. Before this era, President Carter was hated by some of these groups (not polite society though) because he thought human rights were more important that mere power politics. This created and internal rebellion in Washington that was able to paint Carter into a corner no matter how hard he tried and he, facing a hostile bureaucracy and press really couldn't have done much to change that except seen it coming--but he was, in many ways unprepared for the job. Trump, in contrast has faced a more intense opposition and a near revolt of the CIA, the most powerful actor in Washington, and still been able to survive a year and a half in office. Whatever his faults he has survived though I have my doubts that he'll be able to serve out his term facing this kind of high-level opposition.
Trump's rise is important beyond his particular policies and personal quirks. He is the great symbol of the country, the exposure of deep unconscious urges coming from our collective unconscious. Obama, in contrast, signified the tight rule of the ego--he appeared to smooth the waters, to keep things in place, to represent a kind of collective ego that was pleasant and acceptable to most Americans. Trump, in contrast, has turned over rocks, assaulted common decency and become a deeply divisive figure who has caused an explosion of irrationality on all sides of our culture. Calm reasonable analysis is gone. The mainstream media's attempt to be dignified has changed and it mirrors Trump in their insults their promotion of utter fantasies as realities, not unusual to be sure since their main function is to be propaganda organs for various factions within the power-elite but their fanciful accusations fueled by the relentless pressure from powerful figures that believe that Trump needs to be removed from office as a traitor to his country, a Russian agent who is going to deliver the riches of the USA to Mr. Putin. This conspiracy theory, unlike other more potent conspiracy theories that actually have real evidence to support them, is utterly without foundation. Sure Trump is suspicious and clearly an eccentric and has a major problem with what most of us would agree is the truth--but, again, that's become at this time a national trait. We, collectively, are exactly like the Trump so many hate. We are deeply narcissistic, sentimental rather than compassionate, love money and "winning", and have little or no interest in actual science and reason (only the appearance of it), lack knowledge and erudition even in the severely degenerate intellectual class, and prefer fantasy to reality. By hating Trump we avoid our own vices, by hating Russia we avoid dealing with the collective problems we face here and now. By promoting war abroad and cultural conflict at home we avoid our own angers and fears and thrust them from our unconscious to the "outside" without having to work through the emotions that are the real source of our anger, anxiety and depression.
Trump and Putin become, collectively, the Devil--but where is God? Therein lies our deep distress.
associate, pleasure, status, valorizing cravings, sexual appeal, myths we hold of freedom, liberation, greed, selfishness, or generosity.
Rationality is an approach to life that is useful to our ability to handle our environment, evaluate threats, plan for the future and have a reasonably accurate view of our surroundings as well as accomplish our tasks whatever they may be. But beyond that rationality seems to collapse. Rationality, to the extent it is present in us is limited to our conscious mind and that is only the tip of the iceberg of our being. Science and human inquiry have proven the existence of an unconscious that while invisible to us most of the time has a major and even critical role in our lives. The unconscious provides most of our motivation or lack thereof. We are unconsciously sexually attracted to certain people and to certain physical and emotional attributes in others. Our unconscious holds our urges that just seem to come over us. Most people when they watch or read or hear commercials rarely consciously decide to buy a product or service based on what they saw. They usually ignore it yet, the size and income of the advertising industry proves that they know something else is at work. Commercials often seem silly or meaningless but that's only because most effective commercials are engineered to manipulate the unconscious of whatever demographic they are aiming their products to. Generally, commercials associate any deep fear, fascination, urge even that the conscious mind reject to manipulate people particularly those who are highly suggestive, that is, those who can be easily hypnotized. Our magic media whether it is TV or videos online put people into a mild trance so that whatever is suggested has some psychic power behind it. We will get a good feeling when we pick up a product that has been advertised but not remember anything about any commercial--we just buy it believing we have done something good even if the product is toxic, as most, say, food products that come out of the food industry are. On the one hand we know that these sodas we drink harm us on the other hand we get a good feeling when we pick up the soda with the magic logo. Advertisers are experts, even magicians, in being able to quickly strike to the heart of people. They must be very hip to what people are going through at this particular historical moment and have to have an overall understanding of what motivates people, how the psyche is constructed and, above all, the content of most people's mythological framework. The public-relations industry and the media propaganda organs all use similar methods to manipulate public opinion.
Jung divided up the unconscious into three parts, the individual, collective, and universal unconscious. The individual unconscious has to do with experience, urges, ideas, that we have consciously rejected because we realized that in navigating the world these inner preferences urges, fetishes, traumas would weigh us down so we just drop them. The ego that dominates life is necessary to our survival but it must be constructed. When we come up out of the sleep/dream state we boot up our ego and reconstruct our identities with our ongoing narrative. We do it every day very quickly so we don't notice it. The juice, the power however resides in the personal unconscious this is where our spontaneous emotions, desires, goals and so forth are generated. The ego uses the power of these emotions to fuel its structure as it attempts to fulfill these wants and desires which is its job. In certain forms of meditation we are trained to observe as thought arise out of the unconscious and can begin to sense the force behind these thoughts, urges, fantasies.
The second part of our unconscious is our identity with the collective. To be precise that means our family, our culture, our country, our civilization and, to some extent, humanity as a whole. This area contains true mythology or the intellectual framework we are born into we instinctively accept these myths, on the one side, those who believe in the Bible as a guide to life and guns as necessary tools, on the other, those who were brought as atheists in a fairly permissive and cosmopolitan view of life and all the myths surrounding those particular points of view. Also, we have here all the deeper archetypes, the hero, he damsel in distress, the fairy tales, the gods and goddesses of various mythologies that have force and are displayed, today, in fantasy movies particularly super-hero movies pre-figured, particularly, in the great epics of various civilizations.
Third, is the area where we, as individuals, connect with all that is. Here are the great spiritual traditions that emphasize our interdependence with the universe and transcendent realms where words no longer have great meaning where we approach the highest level of consciousness through a "cloud of unknowing." Here we go beyond both consciousness and unconsciousness this is where we find Faith and the Kingdom of Heaven, in the Christian sense, Samadhi, in the Yogic philosophy and Nirvana in the Buddhist sense.
These parts of the unconscious are intertwined--there are no boundaries where one starts and the other begins. Our deepest longings and fears are personal, social, and come from a wordless profundity we each can connect with. In order to have some rule-of-thumb we each construct some kind of mythological framework that might be our own ego-narrative but will be formed within the context of a cultural framework which can override even personal considerations. This explains, for example, heroism in battle or other sorts of self-sacrifice. In a sense within every desire, urge, and fear lies a depth our current set of mythological frameworks have not been able to grasp. In former eras when religion was more influential the frameworks were clear cut. Religion itself is an expression of these frameworks and its rituals connect us to those larger frameworks and, unlike today, don't ask us to have to either reject the deeper areas of consciousness (even if they are unconscious), or have to find our own way through a dizzying variety of world-views, spiritual practices and so on.
Because we lack strong mythological/religious structures since all of them are challenged by other structures that we can't avoid noticing (our ancestors who simply were not exposed to a lot of alternatives) we cling to any ad hoc combination of fragments. Thus we are vulnerable, more than at any time in our past, to any highly sophisticate mind-control regime like those in advertising, public-relations, propaganda and the panoply of cults, religions, gurus, lifestyle cults involving sex, fantasy, sports, gaming, obsession with politics and so on). Any of this could be the focus of our lives or we could have several of these structures in our lives--we can go to church on Sunday, play games during the week and obsess about Donald Trump the rest of the time along with eating, sleeping and making love with our partner. This keeps us internally fragmented and contributes to the growth of anxiety, depression and addiction. In the case of addiction, we solve the problem of fragmentation by focusing on a central occupation--feeding our addiction which becomes our religion. It has the advantage of immediate gratification, is deeply physical usually, provides us with a good feeling, and frees us from all the concerns that most people share.
With the contemporary world mediated by technology, drugs and a variety of urges, addiction, compulsions and a lack of an agreed upon way of looking at the world we become not just exhausted trying to navigate through life without a reliable compass we also have difficulty connecting to others. What if we reveal to other people what we really think and feel? Thus, in polite society, unless we are with people who exactly share our point of view, we are uncomfortable--but even then, if we are among Christians, we may have a very different approach to scripture and the church and some of these differences can be very sharp so the more we rely on our particular view the more threatened we are with those who don't view things the same way. If I believe the Bible is literally true in every way and another Christian tell me that can't be because of the contradictions in the Bible both factual and ethical then I'm threatened--I depend on that book to order my life--if I start doubting passages then where is the end of it? Our egos, who are tasked with helping us survive not just as organisms but socially because society is not an option--we require it to live unless, like religious hermits we've connected with the universal unconscious and made in conscious in our lives, we have transcended that need.
Mythology, it turns out is King and its mate the Queen of the sciences is theology. Theology is not only the study of God are the gods but a study of the universal unconscious. This study is much neglected and, in my view, explains many of the ills of our culture. It is deeper and more important than philosophy, it's younger sister, because it goes deeper. Philosophy uses intellectual power to create a mythological framework rather than the blend of emotional and intellectual power. Theology represents the unity of mind and heart that philosophy can and often does point towards. Whether we like it or not mythological frameworks that involve both head and heart are a requirement--we all live by them. Our current situation is that these frameworks are ungainly pastiches and promote, even by denying the spiritual world, anxiety and conflict. We need these pastiches and so cling to them often desperately. Maybe we'll suddenly jump to another set of priorities. Maybe our religious ideas will lead us to jump to focus on sex or our sexual lives will suddenly cause us to jump full steam into religion. Whatever it is it not very rational--it is rational only in the sense that it meets needs and the ego requires survival no matter how ungainly the structure.
This brings me back to our political/tribal/cultural struggle now magnified by the very strange and distorted lens of the Trump era. Donald Trump, a fixture in the culture as an colorful and eccentric real-estate developer who displays a combination of oafishness, narcissism, sentimentality, and a sort of honesty seen in reality TV has, no matter what happens in the next few years, already changed the course of US history. It has deeply sharpened political and cultural differences to a near fever pitch. His one policies and views are a strange pastiche that reflects our own pastiche-frameworks. There has never been a time I have experienced or read about in US history when both polite society (the upper-middle class), the communications media, and the governing establishment has been so opposed to a President. Before this era, President Carter was hated by some of these groups (not polite society though) because he thought human rights were more important that mere power politics. This created and internal rebellion in Washington that was able to paint Carter into a corner no matter how hard he tried and he, facing a hostile bureaucracy and press really couldn't have done much to change that except seen it coming--but he was, in many ways unprepared for the job. Trump, in contrast has faced a more intense opposition and a near revolt of the CIA, the most powerful actor in Washington, and still been able to survive a year and a half in office. Whatever his faults he has survived though I have my doubts that he'll be able to serve out his term facing this kind of high-level opposition.
Trump's rise is important beyond his particular policies and personal quirks. He is the great symbol of the country, the exposure of deep unconscious urges coming from our collective unconscious. Obama, in contrast, signified the tight rule of the ego--he appeared to smooth the waters, to keep things in place, to represent a kind of collective ego that was pleasant and acceptable to most Americans. Trump, in contrast, has turned over rocks, assaulted common decency and become a deeply divisive figure who has caused an explosion of irrationality on all sides of our culture. Calm reasonable analysis is gone. The mainstream media's attempt to be dignified has changed and it mirrors Trump in their insults their promotion of utter fantasies as realities, not unusual to be sure since their main function is to be propaganda organs for various factions within the power-elite but their fanciful accusations fueled by the relentless pressure from powerful figures that believe that Trump needs to be removed from office as a traitor to his country, a Russian agent who is going to deliver the riches of the USA to Mr. Putin. This conspiracy theory, unlike other more potent conspiracy theories that actually have real evidence to support them, is utterly without foundation. Sure Trump is suspicious and clearly an eccentric and has a major problem with what most of us would agree is the truth--but, again, that's become at this time a national trait. We, collectively, are exactly like the Trump so many hate. We are deeply narcissistic, sentimental rather than compassionate, love money and "winning", and have little or no interest in actual science and reason (only the appearance of it), lack knowledge and erudition even in the severely degenerate intellectual class, and prefer fantasy to reality. By hating Trump we avoid our own vices, by hating Russia we avoid dealing with the collective problems we face here and now. By promoting war abroad and cultural conflict at home we avoid our own angers and fears and thrust them from our unconscious to the "outside" without having to work through the emotions that are the real source of our anger, anxiety and depression.
Trump and Putin become, collectively, the Devil--but where is God? Therein lies our deep distress.
associate, pleasure, status, valorizing cravings, sexual appeal, myths we hold of freedom, liberation, greed, selfishness, or generosity.
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