We are living through, while many are dying from, the results of our willful misunderstanding of the mechanisms of hate.
Feeling hatred is a warning sign that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are seeing the world.
If we heed this warning and examine why such a strong and violent emotion has overwhelmed us we find how ignoring our Shadow has allowed us to externalize the object of our discomfort and we see that the only way out is to stop and look at why we’ve done so; how we’ve accepted an infantile and profoundly dysfunctional reactive perception and response to our situation to take us over. In doing so we have started down the path of turning into just what we hate in those “others” we have locked our focus upon.
We have been watching this play out in a multi generational and global fashion for longer than I’ve been alive. For what may be thousands of years.
At any point, the haters, those in which Power and Hate, linked in a suicidal death-wish growing out of a buried awareness that what they truly cannot abide is their own acceptance of profound evil; could stop and break the cycle. Historically this has not happened. Instead, they add the burden of stopping the cycle to the perverse abuse they pile onto the subjects of their wrath. Consumed in an Egoic Rhapsody they insist that the only way to end “it” is for those they hate to be removed from their sight. Preferably eliminated, purged, pogrom-ed, Finally Solved, in an orgy of euphemistic camouflage for mass-murder, genocide, and ultimately ecocide.
And what they do to their victims has in every case been, in every case, repeated by their victim’s descendants upon another hapless group of those who are seen to lack the capacity to resist. The grandchildren of victims victimizing in a ghoulishly precise repetition of the way their ancestors were treated. Everything that hate piled upon their parents revisited, repeated as hate upon some new other.
This is a time of revelations. As I’ve said here and elsewhere before, not as some doomsday cult’s reading of ancient legends would have it, but quite plainly as a time when cognitive dissonance becomes vanishingly impossible to maintain.
This is the way Nemesis works. The concept of Hubris calling down Nemesis being on ancient tale that does hold lessons for our times. The more we resist revelation the greater the forces Nemesis throws at us to get us to either succumb or learn.
The seemingly meager, yet profound “advantage” we hold living today is that we have this opportunity for clarity. It was not available even just a few decades ago and hadn’t been available since the power mad started taking over the world four or five thousand years ago.
Our “window,” for all its profundity, is short. Once our global awareness is shattered and we are dropped back into isolation and ignorance; as every epoch of destruction since the dawn of civilization has lead to; it will be once again nearly impossible to retain.
Our Predicament is dire and whole. By that I mean that every aspect of existence is wrapped up in it and everything that makes our life and the chances that complex life of any kind persists over a very long time ahead is at risk.
Paradoxically it is our insistence on treating Our Predicament as a series of “problems,” each with some technocratic or mytho-fascist “solution,” is precisely what has pinned us to these dire circumstances.
We apparently are more willing to contemplate total self-destruction over letting go of our patterns of thought and pernicious reliance on the efficacy of Power.
Nemesis will “cure” us of this folly. One way or another….
Thank you, Tony, for this deep study of human psychology. I agree with this reality, and it will take some time for me to come to terms with it.