The DNC; betting that parties should be able to browbeat voters into complicity with their demands instead of courting voters by bending to their interests; has lost again.
An appropriately pessimistic response. You can't be an optimistic cheerleader of a democracy when it's a fraudulent cover for a genocide. I get it. And from that broader and wider perspective you won't have much patience with the reasons why this slide into Trump is the last straw. I still feel that even if is the culmination of business as usual, even if the only difference visible from a wide perspective is the guns turning towards "us" finally and not the distant and invisible usual victims, this still marks an unnecessary turn towards greater psychopathy. The ground level psychology of the gaslighted masses clawing for trump have sold their souls for a dozen eggs and now it's their own corrupted vision that alters the course towards something even worse for all (not just a sharing of the problem). I do think this is something we should have avoided. We don't need this added element, it wasn't necessary to add this self-deceptive license to the mix, which trump lends his victims turned henchmen. We can't pity the gaslighted victims who turn into perpetrators. They have to be brought up short by a realization of their own lost autonomy and hypocrisy in following this piece of shit. But your perspective is not cancelled by this additional insight. Many things that don't need to happen are happening because our focus doesn't swivel rapidly enough to account for everything. But this perspective needed to be added to the pot. Thanks.
The only point I still feel the need to emphasize is that without acknowledging our own, vaguely left-ish expectations,' complicity we fail to see that Trump-ism is not just a reaction to Neoliberalism and its utter irresponsibility towards anything but its comforts and privileges. It is wholly a creature of the Neoliberal establishment.
Neoliberalism is behind all the politics we are allowed to see. Trump was a useful idiot that anyone with any exposure to his youth in New York knew full well by the time he turned thirty. He's only had a "career," in "business" or politics because he's been "covered" by the Neoliberal press for the whole time. This is just like the Prussian old guard buoying up Hitler as a useful tool for their own visions of grandeur. "Make Prussia Great Again!™" after WWI was their idea. The perennial, "The South Will Rise Again!™" mentality. And so, the Clintons and Obama and the DNC behind them goaded Trump into running in '16 and have protected him ever since.
The shams of "fighting for everyone's rights" and "fighting for the free world" have become impossible to maintain in light of Gaza and the Climate Catastrophe. The performative "helplessness" maintained by "following decorum" and "maintaining collegial amity" in congress while giving away the courts has reached the end of any possible "plausible deniability." The usurpation of "Democratic Principles" to continuously force "candidates" who never had to face primary challenges. All this is what's brought us here.
Yes, the "White Poor;" which now increasingly, as we have seen in "Great" Britain where both "Conservative" and "Labour" parties now have many POC in high positions; includes an alarming number of the equivalent to Kapos in Auschwitz; are and will increasingly act-up. This is terrible and horrible; but to focus on this gives cover to the true malevolence behind their "choices" made under incredible duress.
Our owners have been playing this game of hedging their bets and hiding behind the blandishments of "Identity politics." They have wanted a strongman for a long time. They've wanted "their strongman." They don't think they need to worry about what his true-believers and posse of fellow psychopaths might do. Their bunkers are built and well stocked. Their advisors have appraised them of the financial opportunities brought about by taking up En-Gaza-fication. They feel "prepared.
Again, I have no arguments with it. But it's a focal point that is one step wider than what is necessary in relating to my neighbors. Many are not poor. They are infected by the virus from sources deeper in the past, which also infected all the so-called leaders and ringmasters. It's a spreading virus and the farther it spreads into everyday thinking of neighbors and friends, the more urgent the need to find a grounded response to them, from that wider angle. My concern right now is with the psychology of the local communities, which did not need to indulge in this misdirected, self-destroying tantrum. I'd like to dig a little more into the various streams of influence here, some of which don't originate in the elite fascists in charge. I think there are deeper currents of momentum operating here, which also set the power structure in motion. And I think some of these currents need to be traced to the starting point in the individual's own refusal to be honest with themselves. Nothing will kill the fascist overlord structure more thoroughly than individual accounting. You've laid this whole thing out well and very thoroughly from the direction of the fascist power structure down to the individual. I just want to add the nuance of an even more background source that starts in the individual and pollutes macro level. I think it runs in both directions in different ways. And I'd like to confront the individual psychology, the system as it manifests in "me" everywhere, which can shut immediately make irrelevant the machinations of the machinery of state. The private-seeming hypocrisies the individual must pretend are not within them (the pretense of autonomy, independence, and freedom) are signals that welcome and help construct the fascist system. They have been begging for a King to return.
Yes. The fuel behind all of this is the way people, we all, tend to hide from our own Shadow and believe some version of the big lie.
Yes, and this is telling and of great import, many, if not most Trumpistas are not from the easily confused poor. They are comfortably well off and secure in their privileges. One thing I've noticed from personal experience is that many who consider themselves rich, even wealthy, are closer to the poorest among us in their access to money than they are to the hyper-billionaire group whose numbers worldwide would comfortably fit in a small hall. It looks like the same motivation working through all these "lower" levels. The hyper-rich have taken everything to an unheard of extreme, seeing themselves as Gods….
It's this "intermediate rich" group that I relate to the Prussians. The Prussians and the Burgermeisters and managerial classes in Inter-War Germany had all the same traumas and twisted reactions to brutal upbringing you've brought to my attention years ago. The way these same dynamics have swept through US-ian culture is central to any understanding of how this has come to pass and perhaps give clues to how to influence the result.
Nemesis can deal with them. The rest are us. Inquiry into how they may find ways to recognize what we might call their souls, in a rough short-hand, is essential. A lot of this inquiry begins with finding and recognizing the Shadow and the lie in our own selves.
I'm beginning a new post on Inevitability that will enter this area among others.
but I don't want to leap over the tremendous work you did from this direction. I'm busy in a sense right now looking at it from the ground up. And this wider vision you provide is in-forming that all the time. It's a thorough and tremendously insightful article. I am not in disagreement with any of it.
Thank you. I don't see what you've been saying as disagreement and I don't see my responses as disagreeing with yours. It's only through a dynamic of various viewpoints stretching each others perceptions of a question that we can reach any really new understanding. The only way to take any text and have it "live" is for a conversation to develop around it. This is why I welcome and appreciate all the inciteful comments and sincere questions I've been lucky enough to receive.
An attempt at a passing summary for myself: I haven't been watching the news since this election happened. But today my wife checked the headlines and the US is bombing Yemen now for christ's sake. From that level -- from a policy level, a macro level -- the whole edifice is rotten. Harris deserved to lose for supporting Israel. And it doesn't matter whether we vote for the port or the starboard of a sinking and bullet-spraying battleship. As some feel, maybe trump hastens its bloody end.
From the micro-level, the level of neighborly relations, local culture, brown shirt membership level, the scapegoating and aggressive level, I say it mattered. So that's how the two things we're talking about fit for me at this point. We have crossed a micro-level line we've never crossed before (in this country) in giving license to wild and unruly energy, which can feed the macro level.
On the macro level we've crossed no clear line but continued the downward trajectory. Hastened here, slowed there, the distinctions in policy matter little in the end, it's the same trajectory, speeding and slowing in different ways.
Childhood experiences are influencing why we see this more or less as one big ball of manipulation and abuse, throw out the useless distinctions. It little matters whether the guns are pointed at us or other poor people.
Or whether we see a way to survive with our neighborly psychology more or less intact while the larger forces around us rage and rampage as they always do until they burn out. And knowing that it helps nobody, and cripples our capacity to help, when the psychology of the people follows the sociopathic trajectory of the larger world.
I'd like to make a diagram of this cancerous feedback system from macro to micro and from micro to macro.
I'm going to let it sit there. This is just how I'd summarize it for now on a more cartoonish (generalized) level. Thanks.
One thing that comes to mind is that we, the US, has done this before. Some of those times were rather minor in relation to what you lay out; like the reactions to the Veteran's Strike and encampment in the early Twenties, Pinkerton striker breaking, and the time of the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. There were all of the KKK's lynchings and massacres. Not to mention all the support for genociding the Native Americans.
Those times were different in that, except for the last two which were so taken for granted as to have unanimous support from all sides; they did not define an administration. The late 1850's were quite a bit like what you're talking about, I imagine. The kind of active destruction of what had been taken to be integral, if not integrated, communities, families, friendships, marriages, and partnerships. Torn apart, day by day, piece by piece until the only way forward appeared to be civil war.
There's been a lot of talk from the Right; the same coalitions that gave us the first one; relishing such an outcome. January 6th was clearly intended as a Fort Sumpter moment. The garbling effect of the Propaganda Machine both helped derail it as it was happening and has worked overtime to strip it of its intention. Part of the wider effort to keep the owner's true intentions and allegiances hidden while keeping this vile, pathetic wreck "viable" as a candidate. The way this, as with any topic that might lead to informing or enlightening a public that none of the active parties believes should exist as an entity. Certainly not a "partner in governance!" This topic has been attacked with every weapon of trivialization and empty rhetorical flourishes.
The destruction of community has been ongoing. I still remember when the push came in the late 70's and overnight the term "citizen" disappeared and was replaced by "consumer." Everything about capitalism is inimical to community. They find natural allies in fundamentalist cults pining over dysfunctional "nuclear" families that, lacking any other options, are then forced to accept their religious bosses as their "personal saviors."
This does, as you point out bring all these efforts "up a notch," to say the least!
The "cancerous feedback loop" you mention is the way vicious cycles work. As we're given daily lessons just looking out the window, experiencing the Climatic Catastrophe; watching the way vicious cycles entrain and work across multiple scales. It's a perverse lesson in the Implicate Order….
Some what nihilistic, pessimistic...... May I recommend to you the writings of political anthropologist F. G. Bailey. I pulled his 1988 book off the my shelf, Humbuggery and Manipulation, The Art of Leadership, written after Reagan. Just one partial quote" The essentials of political leadership... transcend particular cultures and particular societies. What are these essentials? A summary descriptive answer is malefaction. Everywhere leaders, on the point of failure must break out of the morality they recommend to other people." .... From the blurb on the back.... he shows how reputedly decent leaders as Franklin Roosevelt, Churchill , and even Gandhi used these strategems just as readily as did other less reputable leaders.... On an Orwellian note, I reread Wigan, Paris and Catalonia, and listened to 1984, then did Paul Theoroux seriously well researched novelization of Orwell's time in Burma, Burma Sahib.
I'm glad you bring up Nihilism. Nihilism is an -ism, a belief. A belief in Nothing. It's a simplistic reaction to discovering that one's certainties have been shaken. It does not look into or question the conditioning behind why certainties fail, it is a lashing out, most tellingly with actual violence, because one has been disappointed.
Pessimism is the dual pole of Optimism. I first wrote about this failed dynamic here:
I quoted Ivan Illich in the frontispiece in Shoal Hope:
“Giving up on all optimism and pessimism, one is free to be courageous; one places no trust in tools and instruments; one comes to hope based on human beings.”
None of this has anything to do with Nihilism or Pessimism. This is difficult to get across. It's an area where Proprioception is essential. Proprioception makes it possible for us to feel our habitual reactions arising and suspend judgement/reaction until, by noting our resistance, it dissolves; and let's us take in what appears too hard to acknowledge. In doing so, we break the hold of our conditioning, allowing for a new relationship with what-is.
It may seem hard to accept that a declaration that; everything we have been conditioned over thousands of years to accept is bankrupt and has been leading us to the place we can now see taking shape around the world and intruding into our own lives; as anything but hyperbole; but that is precisely what I am saying. I've also spent decades looking into the parallels between psychological abuse and the way we have been dominated by what; based on the work done by Krishnamurti & Bohm; falls under the broad label of Thought; and, how; difficult it may be; it is not impossible to work beyond its domination.
Yes, the totality of what has been accepted as the role of a leader is based on the bankrupt lie that maintaining the local hegemony on violence is reason enough to do "whatever it takes." What I'm suggesting here is that as we see the end-game of this mandate play out around us it might be time to reconsider. There is also not a sliver of difference between these justifications for power and the justifications abusers give for why we all deserve their violence.
I'd also like to add that while it has been this election and its result that prompted this post; it is not meant as part of the inevitable, "My team lost so everything is now horrible!" reaction. This next phase of dissolution as real Nihilists parade about, living out their fantasies of violent counter-revolution as their opponents "fight back;" is going to be bad. But it is not a break with any kinder, gentler, more egalitarian, or laudable status quo ante. It is all of a piece and the one advantage this gives us is that it increases the level of cognitive dissonance. This; as we have seen many times before; does not automatically improve matters. Without dropping our preconceptions and habitual reactions cognitive dissonance has always just led to a ramping up of doubling down.
Our Predicament is not solvable. That's the nature of predicaments. Expectations that one can get what they want have been tangled up in our confusion over the way cause & effect actually works and the equally erroneous idea that; lashing out in reaction and reaching for the illusion of power will bring us what we want. Even that it is possible to "know what I want" without clearing out much more of the incoherence we have been acclimated to is a hopelessly fantastical expectation.
This is a time of revelation. While not in the cartoon-ish way the Right sees Revelation and Apocalypse as the fulfillment of their apotheosis. The ways in which they try to hide from themselves the gnawing reality that their path can only lead to that proverbial bunker with no wished-for Rapture to save them. These are times that try "men's" souls.
We can either continue the cycles of reaction or we can break the cycle. This is as true in domestic abuse as it is in the domination of Thought.
I'm just beginning to get a sense, through mutual friends of ours, at the way at least some young people today see all of this critique and energy spent going over how we got here as wasted effort and useless. To them. They have only known the end-game and its increasingly visible and destructive binds for what they are. They have no need to have their cognitive biases explained away. For them the urgency is clear.
Now, urgency can also become a mechanism of short-circuit….
We've been herded, as if by sheepdogs, for these thousands of years to stay within the boundaries of Thought. Every effort to enact change has been short-circuited, returning us to where we started, chaffing at; but never escaping our binds.
This moment, our moment; when we have a fleeting opportunity to come to a Proprioceptive relationship with what-is; has not ever been available before and provides a unique opportunity to end these cycles. We are in a race with Nemesis. These cycles will end one way or another.
Thank you for your response. It's difficult carrying on one side of what needs to be a dialogue unless others are willing to join the conversation. It's also hard for all of us to recognize that while we are conditioned to expect "discussion" and argument/counter-argument; a dialogue cannot take place without our willingness to give space to where each of us finds ourselves at the moment and work towards a mutual understanding.
Politics is the "poster-child" for the failures of the "battle of ideas." Current politics have reduced this to its absurd conclusion.
Right, I had just come back online to change that from pessimism to realism when I saw this. I was responding indirectly to the other message and wasn't being careful.
An appropriately pessimistic response. You can't be an optimistic cheerleader of a democracy when it's a fraudulent cover for a genocide. I get it. And from that broader and wider perspective you won't have much patience with the reasons why this slide into Trump is the last straw. I still feel that even if is the culmination of business as usual, even if the only difference visible from a wide perspective is the guns turning towards "us" finally and not the distant and invisible usual victims, this still marks an unnecessary turn towards greater psychopathy. The ground level psychology of the gaslighted masses clawing for trump have sold their souls for a dozen eggs and now it's their own corrupted vision that alters the course towards something even worse for all (not just a sharing of the problem). I do think this is something we should have avoided. We don't need this added element, it wasn't necessary to add this self-deceptive license to the mix, which trump lends his victims turned henchmen. We can't pity the gaslighted victims who turn into perpetrators. They have to be brought up short by a realization of their own lost autonomy and hypocrisy in following this piece of shit. But your perspective is not cancelled by this additional insight. Many things that don't need to happen are happening because our focus doesn't swivel rapidly enough to account for everything. But this perspective needed to be added to the pot. Thanks.
The only point I still feel the need to emphasize is that without acknowledging our own, vaguely left-ish expectations,' complicity we fail to see that Trump-ism is not just a reaction to Neoliberalism and its utter irresponsibility towards anything but its comforts and privileges. It is wholly a creature of the Neoliberal establishment.
Neoliberalism is behind all the politics we are allowed to see. Trump was a useful idiot that anyone with any exposure to his youth in New York knew full well by the time he turned thirty. He's only had a "career," in "business" or politics because he's been "covered" by the Neoliberal press for the whole time. This is just like the Prussian old guard buoying up Hitler as a useful tool for their own visions of grandeur. "Make Prussia Great Again!™" after WWI was their idea. The perennial, "The South Will Rise Again!™" mentality. And so, the Clintons and Obama and the DNC behind them goaded Trump into running in '16 and have protected him ever since.
The shams of "fighting for everyone's rights" and "fighting for the free world" have become impossible to maintain in light of Gaza and the Climate Catastrophe. The performative "helplessness" maintained by "following decorum" and "maintaining collegial amity" in congress while giving away the courts has reached the end of any possible "plausible deniability." The usurpation of "Democratic Principles" to continuously force "candidates" who never had to face primary challenges. All this is what's brought us here.
Yes, the "White Poor;" which now increasingly, as we have seen in "Great" Britain where both "Conservative" and "Labour" parties now have many POC in high positions; includes an alarming number of the equivalent to Kapos in Auschwitz; are and will increasingly act-up. This is terrible and horrible; but to focus on this gives cover to the true malevolence behind their "choices" made under incredible duress.
Our owners have been playing this game of hedging their bets and hiding behind the blandishments of "Identity politics." They have wanted a strongman for a long time. They've wanted "their strongman." They don't think they need to worry about what his true-believers and posse of fellow psychopaths might do. Their bunkers are built and well stocked. Their advisors have appraised them of the financial opportunities brought about by taking up En-Gaza-fication. They feel "prepared.
So did the Prussians….
Again, I have no arguments with it. But it's a focal point that is one step wider than what is necessary in relating to my neighbors. Many are not poor. They are infected by the virus from sources deeper in the past, which also infected all the so-called leaders and ringmasters. It's a spreading virus and the farther it spreads into everyday thinking of neighbors and friends, the more urgent the need to find a grounded response to them, from that wider angle. My concern right now is with the psychology of the local communities, which did not need to indulge in this misdirected, self-destroying tantrum. I'd like to dig a little more into the various streams of influence here, some of which don't originate in the elite fascists in charge. I think there are deeper currents of momentum operating here, which also set the power structure in motion. And I think some of these currents need to be traced to the starting point in the individual's own refusal to be honest with themselves. Nothing will kill the fascist overlord structure more thoroughly than individual accounting. You've laid this whole thing out well and very thoroughly from the direction of the fascist power structure down to the individual. I just want to add the nuance of an even more background source that starts in the individual and pollutes macro level. I think it runs in both directions in different ways. And I'd like to confront the individual psychology, the system as it manifests in "me" everywhere, which can shut immediately make irrelevant the machinations of the machinery of state. The private-seeming hypocrisies the individual must pretend are not within them (the pretense of autonomy, independence, and freedom) are signals that welcome and help construct the fascist system. They have been begging for a King to return.
Thank you for the clarification.
Yes. The fuel behind all of this is the way people, we all, tend to hide from our own Shadow and believe some version of the big lie.
Yes, and this is telling and of great import, many, if not most Trumpistas are not from the easily confused poor. They are comfortably well off and secure in their privileges. One thing I've noticed from personal experience is that many who consider themselves rich, even wealthy, are closer to the poorest among us in their access to money than they are to the hyper-billionaire group whose numbers worldwide would comfortably fit in a small hall. It looks like the same motivation working through all these "lower" levels. The hyper-rich have taken everything to an unheard of extreme, seeing themselves as Gods….
It's this "intermediate rich" group that I relate to the Prussians. The Prussians and the Burgermeisters and managerial classes in Inter-War Germany had all the same traumas and twisted reactions to brutal upbringing you've brought to my attention years ago. The way these same dynamics have swept through US-ian culture is central to any understanding of how this has come to pass and perhaps give clues to how to influence the result.
Nemesis can deal with them. The rest are us. Inquiry into how they may find ways to recognize what we might call their souls, in a rough short-hand, is essential. A lot of this inquiry begins with finding and recognizing the Shadow and the lie in our own selves.
I'm beginning a new post on Inevitability that will enter this area among others.
but I don't want to leap over the tremendous work you did from this direction. I'm busy in a sense right now looking at it from the ground up. And this wider vision you provide is in-forming that all the time. It's a thorough and tremendously insightful article. I am not in disagreement with any of it.
Thank you. I don't see what you've been saying as disagreement and I don't see my responses as disagreeing with yours. It's only through a dynamic of various viewpoints stretching each others perceptions of a question that we can reach any really new understanding. The only way to take any text and have it "live" is for a conversation to develop around it. This is why I welcome and appreciate all the inciteful comments and sincere questions I've been lucky enough to receive.
An attempt at a passing summary for myself: I haven't been watching the news since this election happened. But today my wife checked the headlines and the US is bombing Yemen now for christ's sake. From that level -- from a policy level, a macro level -- the whole edifice is rotten. Harris deserved to lose for supporting Israel. And it doesn't matter whether we vote for the port or the starboard of a sinking and bullet-spraying battleship. As some feel, maybe trump hastens its bloody end.
From the micro-level, the level of neighborly relations, local culture, brown shirt membership level, the scapegoating and aggressive level, I say it mattered. So that's how the two things we're talking about fit for me at this point. We have crossed a micro-level line we've never crossed before (in this country) in giving license to wild and unruly energy, which can feed the macro level.
On the macro level we've crossed no clear line but continued the downward trajectory. Hastened here, slowed there, the distinctions in policy matter little in the end, it's the same trajectory, speeding and slowing in different ways.
Childhood experiences are influencing why we see this more or less as one big ball of manipulation and abuse, throw out the useless distinctions. It little matters whether the guns are pointed at us or other poor people.
Or whether we see a way to survive with our neighborly psychology more or less intact while the larger forces around us rage and rampage as they always do until they burn out. And knowing that it helps nobody, and cripples our capacity to help, when the psychology of the people follows the sociopathic trajectory of the larger world.
I'd like to make a diagram of this cancerous feedback system from macro to micro and from micro to macro.
I'm going to let it sit there. This is just how I'd summarize it for now on a more cartoonish (generalized) level. Thanks.
Jeff,
This is helpful.
One thing that comes to mind is that we, the US, has done this before. Some of those times were rather minor in relation to what you lay out; like the reactions to the Veteran's Strike and encampment in the early Twenties, Pinkerton striker breaking, and the time of the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. There were all of the KKK's lynchings and massacres. Not to mention all the support for genociding the Native Americans.
Those times were different in that, except for the last two which were so taken for granted as to have unanimous support from all sides; they did not define an administration. The late 1850's were quite a bit like what you're talking about, I imagine. The kind of active destruction of what had been taken to be integral, if not integrated, communities, families, friendships, marriages, and partnerships. Torn apart, day by day, piece by piece until the only way forward appeared to be civil war.
There's been a lot of talk from the Right; the same coalitions that gave us the first one; relishing such an outcome. January 6th was clearly intended as a Fort Sumpter moment. The garbling effect of the Propaganda Machine both helped derail it as it was happening and has worked overtime to strip it of its intention. Part of the wider effort to keep the owner's true intentions and allegiances hidden while keeping this vile, pathetic wreck "viable" as a candidate. The way this, as with any topic that might lead to informing or enlightening a public that none of the active parties believes should exist as an entity. Certainly not a "partner in governance!" This topic has been attacked with every weapon of trivialization and empty rhetorical flourishes.
The destruction of community has been ongoing. I still remember when the push came in the late 70's and overnight the term "citizen" disappeared and was replaced by "consumer." Everything about capitalism is inimical to community. They find natural allies in fundamentalist cults pining over dysfunctional "nuclear" families that, lacking any other options, are then forced to accept their religious bosses as their "personal saviors."
This does, as you point out bring all these efforts "up a notch," to say the least!
The "cancerous feedback loop" you mention is the way vicious cycles work. As we're given daily lessons just looking out the window, experiencing the Climatic Catastrophe; watching the way vicious cycles entrain and work across multiple scales. It's a perverse lesson in the Implicate Order….
I would edit this for concision, but see no way to do that.
No, it's not pessimistic. It's realistic.
Some what nihilistic, pessimistic...... May I recommend to you the writings of political anthropologist F. G. Bailey. I pulled his 1988 book off the my shelf, Humbuggery and Manipulation, The Art of Leadership, written after Reagan. Just one partial quote" The essentials of political leadership... transcend particular cultures and particular societies. What are these essentials? A summary descriptive answer is malefaction. Everywhere leaders, on the point of failure must break out of the morality they recommend to other people." .... From the blurb on the back.... he shows how reputedly decent leaders as Franklin Roosevelt, Churchill , and even Gandhi used these strategems just as readily as did other less reputable leaders.... On an Orwellian note, I reread Wigan, Paris and Catalonia, and listened to 1984, then did Paul Theoroux seriously well researched novelization of Orwell's time in Burma, Burma Sahib.
I'm glad you bring up Nihilism. Nihilism is an -ism, a belief. A belief in Nothing. It's a simplistic reaction to discovering that one's certainties have been shaken. It does not look into or question the conditioning behind why certainties fail, it is a lashing out, most tellingly with actual violence, because one has been disappointed.
Pessimism is the dual pole of Optimism. I first wrote about this failed dynamic here:
https://antoniodias.substack.com/p/the-mainstreams-misunderstanding
And have returned to the subject many times.
I quoted Ivan Illich in the frontispiece in Shoal Hope:
“Giving up on all optimism and pessimism, one is free to be courageous; one places no trust in tools and instruments; one comes to hope based on human beings.”
None of this has anything to do with Nihilism or Pessimism. This is difficult to get across. It's an area where Proprioception is essential. Proprioception makes it possible for us to feel our habitual reactions arising and suspend judgement/reaction until, by noting our resistance, it dissolves; and let's us take in what appears too hard to acknowledge. In doing so, we break the hold of our conditioning, allowing for a new relationship with what-is.
It may seem hard to accept that a declaration that; everything we have been conditioned over thousands of years to accept is bankrupt and has been leading us to the place we can now see taking shape around the world and intruding into our own lives; as anything but hyperbole; but that is precisely what I am saying. I've also spent decades looking into the parallels between psychological abuse and the way we have been dominated by what; based on the work done by Krishnamurti & Bohm; falls under the broad label of Thought; and, how; difficult it may be; it is not impossible to work beyond its domination.
Yes, the totality of what has been accepted as the role of a leader is based on the bankrupt lie that maintaining the local hegemony on violence is reason enough to do "whatever it takes." What I'm suggesting here is that as we see the end-game of this mandate play out around us it might be time to reconsider. There is also not a sliver of difference between these justifications for power and the justifications abusers give for why we all deserve their violence.
I'd also like to add that while it has been this election and its result that prompted this post; it is not meant as part of the inevitable, "My team lost so everything is now horrible!" reaction. This next phase of dissolution as real Nihilists parade about, living out their fantasies of violent counter-revolution as their opponents "fight back;" is going to be bad. But it is not a break with any kinder, gentler, more egalitarian, or laudable status quo ante. It is all of a piece and the one advantage this gives us is that it increases the level of cognitive dissonance. This; as we have seen many times before; does not automatically improve matters. Without dropping our preconceptions and habitual reactions cognitive dissonance has always just led to a ramping up of doubling down.
Our Predicament is not solvable. That's the nature of predicaments. Expectations that one can get what they want have been tangled up in our confusion over the way cause & effect actually works and the equally erroneous idea that; lashing out in reaction and reaching for the illusion of power will bring us what we want. Even that it is possible to "know what I want" without clearing out much more of the incoherence we have been acclimated to is a hopelessly fantastical expectation.
This is a time of revelation. While not in the cartoon-ish way the Right sees Revelation and Apocalypse as the fulfillment of their apotheosis. The ways in which they try to hide from themselves the gnawing reality that their path can only lead to that proverbial bunker with no wished-for Rapture to save them. These are times that try "men's" souls.
We can either continue the cycles of reaction or we can break the cycle. This is as true in domestic abuse as it is in the domination of Thought.
I'm just beginning to get a sense, through mutual friends of ours, at the way at least some young people today see all of this critique and energy spent going over how we got here as wasted effort and useless. To them. They have only known the end-game and its increasingly visible and destructive binds for what they are. They have no need to have their cognitive biases explained away. For them the urgency is clear.
Now, urgency can also become a mechanism of short-circuit….
We've been herded, as if by sheepdogs, for these thousands of years to stay within the boundaries of Thought. Every effort to enact change has been short-circuited, returning us to where we started, chaffing at; but never escaping our binds.
This moment, our moment; when we have a fleeting opportunity to come to a Proprioceptive relationship with what-is; has not ever been available before and provides a unique opportunity to end these cycles. We are in a race with Nemesis. These cycles will end one way or another.
Thank you for your response. It's difficult carrying on one side of what needs to be a dialogue unless others are willing to join the conversation. It's also hard for all of us to recognize that while we are conditioned to expect "discussion" and argument/counter-argument; a dialogue cannot take place without our willingness to give space to where each of us finds ourselves at the moment and work towards a mutual understanding.
Politics is the "poster-child" for the failures of the "battle of ideas." Current politics have reduced this to its absurd conclusion.
Right, I had just come back online to change that from pessimism to realism when I saw this. I was responding indirectly to the other message and wasn't being careful.