The view of an octogenarian Canadian looking south over the border…. January 25, 2025

 A Facebook message with the question: ‘Do you agree that Trump has effectively staged a ‘political coup’ in the United States?’ evokes this response from Ian Bremmer of Gzero, ‘Hi, no I don’t.’

I wonder about the difference in perception between an American geopolitical scholar, researcher, executive and prophetic voice in international affairs (Bremner) and this octogenarian Canadian English teacher, free-lance journalist, clergy….the short answer to the difference is ‘Bremner knows’ and this scribe ‘doesn’t’!

As I posed the question, I have been moving toward the word ‘coup’ for several years, as I surveyed the various public, political, scholarly and ethical/legal responses on both news and social media platforms. The phrase, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ rumbles through the corridors of this cranium, not in derision of the many accurate, detailed, specific and literal reports of the Trump decade. The obvious, indisputable, intractable and also deflected and disavowed plethora of injustices, abrogation of laws, defiance of human rights, commandeering and seducing of loyalists from the Republican establishment to the Proud Boys, the Oak Boys and the succumbing of highly respected, credentialed and legitimate voices on cable news, not to mention the complete ‘take-over’ of Fox whatever it is, all of it covered over in a highly toxic, sugar-coated veneer or sauce of deception, propaganda, seduction and manipulation paints a picture that, for this non-scholar, of an intended political and gestating political coup. Britannica defines a coup d’etat this way:

a sudden, violent overthrow of an existing government by a small group. The chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements. Unlike a revolution which is usually achieved by large  numbers of people working for basic social, economic and political change, a coup is a change in power from the top that merely results in the abrupt replacement of leading government personnel. A coup rarely alters a nation’s fundamental social and economic policies, nor does it significantly redistribute power among competing political groups.

Hybrids are a sign of the times, in cars, and perhaps in government take-overs. Hybrids conventionally bring together different traits, or features to generate a model of Hegel’s synthesis (out of thesis, anti-thesis)…examples such as gas/electric, and genetic hybrids such as hinny, a cross between a female donkey and a male horse. Paradoxically, in the U.S. at least viewed from a perch on the 49^th parallel, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, a hybrid (coup/revolution) has evoked a contrarian ‘rush to the edges of the extremes. Perhaps, (read, it surely might be!), we have lost the intellectual capacity or willingness in our public discourse and debate, to recognize, respect and accept perceptions that embrace paradox, irony, and metaphor. Locked as we are in a literal, empirical, scientific universe of binary opposites, Trump’s cult (coup?) may have bested the American electorate on our own petard….blindness to a complex, complicated even irreconcilable juxtaposition of opposites. It is just such an ever-spiraling, unpredictable, green-broke horse that has taken over the pasture, not merely a fox in the hen-house.

Literalisms, legalisms, medical diagnoses, and empirical data are not either amenable to imaginative metaphors, nor do they embrace what James Hillman dubs a ‘soul history’ as compared with a ‘case history.’ The case history details the events, degrees, marriages, divorces, titles, awards, rewards etc. of the individual. When applied to a nation, a similar catalogue spills over into the annals of the history books and the nationalists’ ceremonies of celebration, remembrance and honouring. A soul focuses on the inner/interior/emotional/shame-filled/crisis moments of that chronological history. As applied to a nation, it identifies the most difficult and painful, pivotal perhaps unresolved episodes of the soul of the nation. And while it may differ from a case history, it is not necessarily completely different from it.

Politicians have always coloured the facts with their ‘spin’ on them. Serious divisive and even irreconcilable and perhaps existential crises, including the many interpretations and iterations that observers, both professional and lay, have cast over those ‘soul’ moments, help to tease out some of the more penetrating and indelible and inescapable, if hidden or unconscious, or denied or even defied truths of that soul. A nation that has succumbed to the ‘salesmanship’ (or as Donny Deutsch puts it, ‘marketing’) template as the method of achieving whatever it considers success, stands inevitably to see that template triumph in that history.

Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, (p.225) contains these words penned in 1996:

Our republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educated our children to believe the information Superhighway is the road to knowledge. If one clue to psychopathy is a trivial mind expressing itself in high-sounding phrases, then an education emphasizing facts rather than thinking, and patriotic, politically or religiously correct ‘values’ rather than critical judgement may produce a nation of achieving high school graduates who are also psychopaths.

Psychiatric Times says this about psychopathy:

(It) is characterized by diagnostic features such as superficial charm, high intelligence, poor judgement and failure to learn from experience, pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love, lack of remorse, or shame, impulsivity, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, manipulative behavior, poor self-control, promiscuous sexual behavior, juvenile delinquency, and criminal versatility, among others. As a consequence of these criteria, the image of the psychopath is that of a cold, heartless, inhuman being…Like healthy people, many psychopaths love their parents, spouse children and pets in their own way, but they have difficulty in loving and trusting the rest of the world. Furthermore psychopaths suffer emotionally as a consequence of separation, divorce, death of a beloved person or dissatisfaction with their own deviant behavior.

And while I despise throwing around psychiatric diagnoses as if to say we all have the credentials, training and privilege of using those labels, and their complexity is rarely contained in their vernacular use, it might be appropriate to borrow from one observer:

Lloyd Farrel (on, Facebook Group Posts under the title, James Hillman-Archetypal Psychology) writes:

The successful psychopath pleases the crowd and wins elections. The thick glass of the TV tube and its chameleon-like versatility in displaying whatever is wanted favors distance, coldness, and the front of charm, as do many of the sleek accoutrements of high station in the political, legal, religious and corporate structures. Anyone who rises in a world that worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy. The psychopath today no longer slinks like a dirty rat through the dark alleys of black-and-white 1930’s crime films, but parades through the boulevards in a bullet-proof limo on state visits, runs entire nations, and sends delegates to the U.N.

Neither a coup nor a revolution, in the traditional terms, perhaps. Nevertheless, in a world metaphorically dystopian, disorienting and dangerous, in so many ways, we might want to listen to Michael Wolff, from two occasions. First, from 1918, as part of a School of Public Policy & Governance public event at the University of Toronto. Quoting Noreen Ahmed-Ullah, U of T News, on March 9, 2018:

Speaking to a packed crowd at Convocation Hall, Wolff recalled a moment when Donald Trump was still on the campaign trail. ‘I asked him, what’s your goal here?’ Wolff said. ‘He said in a very straightforward way, to be the most famous man on Earth.’  

Wolff appearing on the BBC shortly after the inauguration in 2025, in a memorable and insightful moment, said, ‘We have to be much more imaginative when looking at President Trump!’

Imagination, however, to a schooled reporter, is anathema to the work, Accuracy, verifiability, and second-and-third-sourced and validated facts are the stuff of the reporter’s oxygen. The image of accuracy and timeliness flows in his or her veins. From a little distance, we may be getting lost in the literal, empirical technical, verifiable details of hourly, if not instantly recorded X-quips, while the “X-quipper” skips merrily along laughing at us in our blind, yet honorable and ethical diligence of fact-checking, word-parsing, and political and professional anxiety of the most self-sabotaging sort.

Governments (especially Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama for now) and corporations, mayors, and even foreign governments like those in the U.K. and in Germany are fending off slanderous insults from the most high-profile Trump marionette (Musk) as the knights of the psychopathic ‘round table continue to wreak havoc with our individual and our collective lives.

Are we becoming impaled on the horns of our own determination to look down the telescope backwards?

An update for readers of this space (December 29/24)

 Since October 7/24, I have been absent from these pages...absent but not inactive. 

Instead of writing in this space, I have been engaged in a fictional project amost daily that has been progressing somewhat spontaneously, if a little turbulently.

I do hope to be able to return to the 'blog' in the near future....and I thank all of those who find whatever it is they need, seek or find here for their continuing presence.

In the last 30 days, google analytics tells me there have been some 16k page reads here and for that I am humbled and grateful.

With sincere thanks,

John

p.s. wishing everyone a 2025 that is not fraught with guns, bombs, missiles, drones, lies and nationalist supremacy!

cell913blog.com #82

 On this first anniversary of the Hamas insurgence, murder, rape, pillage and kidnapping of hostages, many of whom are still enslaved, one is prompted to ‘take sides’ for/against Hamas or Israel. Initiators, as ‘who started the fight in the school yard,’ have their share of responsibility, guilt, shame and accountability. Whomever the bully attacks, also, in open and vigorous response, has their share of responsibility, guilt, shame and accountability. And in this case, The Israelis have a steroidal degree of shame and responsibility, having killed, maimed, destroyed the lives of thousands, devastated Gaza and are now embroiled in a fight against Hezbollah, another of Iran’s sycophants. Let’s not forget, or omit, or turn away from the basic notion that Iran has a stated, unapologetic, unabashed and historic hatred for and serious ambition of eradicating Israel from the planet.

Existential crises, for Israel, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, for Sudan, and likely for others currently or about to be, epitomize another planetary crisis, the heating of the climate, and the devastation that continues to bring, while our headlines are over-stuffed with the daily grind of bombs, deaths, invasions, captures and, today, ceremonies commemorating the October 7^th disaster. And, as in all ‘headlines, the story has ‘legs’ into the future, and ‘roots’ from the past.

Sooner or later, Israel will be confronted, far more seriously and legally than by these words, with the question, “Is Israel conducting a campaign of apartheid?”

Eventually, denial, obfuscation, distraction, political gamesmanship and even the best legal minds will be brought up “straight” with this allegation. It may take decades, and courts that currently do not exist, in international fora that await inception, gestation and execution. But the truth will eventually ‘out’!

Roaring about the elimination of Hamas, by Netanyahu, however, even linked with hundreds of bunker bombs, missiles, drones and hand-to-hand combat will never erase the motive, the ideology and the cast of characters that are Hamas. The current cast, just like the current cast of leaders of Hezbollah may be eliminated; their shared cause, however, and the militants ready to sacrifice life and limb in its pursuit, will never be eliminated. And such a ‘lion’s roar’ from Netanyahu is hollow in its birth, delivery and potential execution.

The roaring, itself, however, is shouting from various ‘lion-wannabe’ throats with varying decibels, cacophonies, and lyrics; Putin from Moscow about eliminating fascists in Ukraine; a more sinister ‘whisper’ from Bejing about the potential invasion of Taiwan; and then there is the faux American lion currently attempting to blast, to shout, to harangue, to detest, to hate, to cry victim his way back into the Oval Office. Some naïve voters even tell pollsters, ‘He’s a thug; and we need a thug of our own to go against the other world thugs!’ Thuggery as a lion’s roar, however, fails to meet the basic ‘smell test’ of authenticity, integrity, resonance and credibility.

James Hillman, archetypal psychologist, writing in A Blue Fire, says:

So, the question of evil, like the question of ugliness, refers primarily to the anesthetized heart, the heart that has no reason to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness. The desert of modernity. Surprisingly, this desert is not heartless, because the desert is where the lion lives. There is a long-standing association of desert and lion in the same image, so that if we wish to find the responsive heart again we must go where it seems to be least present. (A Blue Fire, p. 304)

These raging bulls (certainly not lions in Hillman’s connotation, are calling out the authentic lion’s roar, from those who know deeply, profoundly, and intimately the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘good’.

According to Physiologus (the traditional lore of animal psychology) the lion’s cubs are stillborn. They must be awakened into life by a roar. That is why the lion has such a roar: to awaken the young lions asleep, as they sleep in our hearts. Evidently, the thought of the heart is not simply given, a native spontaneous reaction, always ready, always there. Rather the heart must be provoked, called forth, which is precisely Marsilio Ficino’s etymology of beauty: kallos, he says, comes from kaleo, ‘provoke.’ ‘The beautiful fathers the good’ (Plato, Hippas Majoy, 297b). Beauty must be raged, or outraged into life, for the lion’s cubs are stillborn, like our lazy political compliance, our meat-eating stupor before the television set, the paralysis for which the lion’s own metal, gold, was the Paracelsian pharmakon. What is passive, immobile, asleep in the heart creates a desert which can only be cured by its own parenting principle that shows its awakening care by roaring. ‘The lion roars at the enraging desert,’ wrote Wallace Stevens. ‘Heart, instinct, principle,;…again Pascal….The more our desert the more we must rage, which rage is love. The passions of the soul make the desert habitable. One inhabits, not a cave of rock, but the heart within the lion. The saints are not dead; they live in the leonine passions of the soul, in the tempting images, the sulfuric fantasies and mirages: love’s road. Our way through the desert of life or any moment in life is the awakening to it as a desert, the awakening of the beast, that vigil of desire, its greedy paw, how and sleepless as the sun, fulminating as sulfur, setting the soul on fire. Like cures like: the desert beast is our guardian in the desert of modern bureaucracy, ugly urbanism, academic trivialities, professional official soullessness, the desert of our ignoble condition…

We fear that rage. We dare not roar. With Auschwitz behind us and the bomb over the horizon, we let the little lions sleep in front of the television, the heart stuffed full of its own coagulated sulfur, now become a beast in a lair readying its attack the next infarct…Psychologically, we subdue our rage with negative euphemistic concepts: aggression, hostility, power complex, terrorism, ambition, the problem of violence. (A Blue Fire, 304-305 excerpted from two lectures, the thought of the heart and the soul of the world 24-33, 41-44)

Hillman was certainly not writing about the current presidential campaign, although his words are prescient, and can be applied, as an instructive, imaginative, creative, and exhorting metaphor to envision two desperately needed outcomes:

first, the identification of the ‘roar’ of the lying, frozen-hearted, callous, self-serving bully-tyrant as a false lion;

second: to awaken the lion’s roar in the hearts of those who see, seek, know, grasp and dream of beauty, the spark of the good.

Liz Cheney, Admiral McChrystal, Dick Cheney, hundreds of former trump-administration officials, lawyers, judges, Magic Johnson…and many others, while supportive and roaring their ‘vote’ for the Harris-Walz ticket, are insufficient.

Wakening the ‘lazy political compliance’ that lies stupefied in front of the television, by the lion’s roar will take a wake-up call commensurate with the desert of our shared time in history.

Recognizing the ‘modern bureaucracy, ugly urbanism, academic trivialities, professional official soullessness, the desert of our ignoble condition’ as the real desert, and not the carnage, crime, rape and infestation of immigrants eating dogs and cats that are hourly spewed from the mouths of both the candidate and his sycophant, might be the first step in peeling opening our eyes to the real desert. Recognizing the potential seduction to the roar of this ‘faux-beast’ could well be a second step. A third could well be the growing consciousness of apathy insouciance, disassociation and disdain for the whole process of democracy, including elections, campaigning and the tidal wave of billions of dollars of advertising.

‘Denial’ is not just a river in Egypt’ as the cliché goes! It is a sometimes willful, often unconscious turning away from the desert on which we all live. Slumber, a few snacks, a tour of binge-watching on Netflix, a few small wagers on the latest pro-sports game, and then back to work, for those who have jobs. For those still seeking gainful employment, the story is even more desperate, debilitating and depressing.

The lion’s roar that lies quiet in the hearts of the millions of ordinary Americans is not only invited, it is urgently required, if the nation is to come to its senses. Discerning the fake lion from the authentic lion in the heart of the millions of Americans who ‘know’ the difference, and then letting that lion roar, without fear, without anxiety, without looking over the shoulder in anticipation of public assassination, may help to turn this ‘ship’ around, from the spectre of another four years of the hollow-man and his cult.

cell913blog.com #81

 We have two democratic allied countries—Ukraine and Israel— that are at war. We now have two radicalized portions of our population in the millions who both are on opposite sides of the spectrum and believe we shouldn’t be supporting one or the other of our proxies in this war. That is cognitive warfare happening in real time. None of that is naturally occurring.

It is not a mystery if you are watching Russian and Chinese (cyber)accounts where the narratives are coming from. If you knew where to look on October 7, it was just like a blitzkrieg on these accounts. Russia and China had the same accounts all together at the same time. We tracked these accounts, we know what they’re saying, and it all happened exactly in coordination with the attack. And so even some of the American accounts that we knew were either fake American accounts or trolls. Organizations that themselves have been clearly co-opted by Russian and Chinese actors were all basically humming to the same tune within 12 hours of the initial October 7 invasion before Israel had even gotten a response or even shut down the first attacks. 

The cognitive warfare attack, which was a combined arms operation between Russia, China, and Iran, happened simultaneously with the October 7 attacks. Now, can I explain how they coordinated that? No, but I know it happened at the same time because I watched it happen in real-time. (These words are those of Constantine Nicolaidas, being interviewed by Sohan Mewada, an associate editor at the Renew Democracy Initiative, RDI.com, October 2, 2024, in a piece entitled Waging Cognitive War.)

Constantine Nicolaidas is principal of user research at Carnevale Interactive and has previously spoken on geopolitics, cyberthreats, and building organizational resilience at DEFCON.

The protractive, heroic and ultimately successful campaign for equal human rights in including the establishment of a democracy in South Africa, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela was and remains an epic historic accomplishment. Self-less, humble, highly intelligent and collaborative leadership, including the ability and willingness to ‘see’ the strengths of his compatriots in the struggle remains seminal in twentieth-century world history. Support from the UN and the West was instrumental in this deconstruction of apartheid.

Today, the global contest for basic stability, security, freedom, and protection from enemies now intimately connected in both technology and motive to sew the seeds of entropy, erosion, destruction, self-doubt among liberal democracies with a view to replacing them with the eventually dominance of autocracies, oligarchies, dictatorships has already formed the necessary alliances, technologies, motives and visions that are not abstract political ideas, notions or even fantasies. While hundreds of missiles rain down daily on both Israel and Ukraine, from both Iran and Russia respectively, China apparently continues to serve as puppet-master to the puppet-masters of Putin and the Iranian regime. Putin’s puppets, the most evident example is Lukashenko, president of Belarus. In Russia itself, there is a cadre of internal puppets, who help to enable Putin to remain in power. Andew Roth, in The Guardian, March 10, 2024, writes:

As Putin seeks a new presidential term into his third decade in power, his electoral system is propped up by a political elite adept at managing the shifting political winds. Those who know Mironov (former Putin opponent), describe him as a consummate political survivor who has sought to ‘catch’ political trends to his own benefit….(His son, Yaroslav says) ‘He’s a person who doesn’t think any rules exist and whatever advantage he manages to obtain for himself is correct.

Iran, on the other hand, has its terrorist cell ‘puppets,’ Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthi’s in Yemen, all openly, simultaneously and vigorously preluding and underscoring the direct attack on Israel by Iran herself.

While buildings crumble, men, women and children die and/or are wounded as innocents in Gaza, Lebanon, Israel, Ukraine, another ‘war’ is being conducted at a cognitive, cyber, dis-and-mal-information level by Iran, China, and Russia. Reuters, on October 2, 2024, through their reporter, Ted Hesson, in a piece entitled, ‘Russia, Iran, China expected to use AI to try to influence US election, report says,’ reports:

The U.S. sees a growing threat of Russia, Iran and China attempting to influence the Nov. 5 elections, including by using artificial intelligence to disseminate fake or divisive information, according to an annual U.S. threat assessment released on Wednesday. Russian ‘influence actors’ have amplified stories about migrants entering the U.S. in a attempt to stoke discord, according to the Department of Homeland Security report, and have used generative AI to create fake websites that appeared to be authentic U.S.-based media outlets. Iran has become ‘increasingly aggressive in its foreign influence efforts,’ the report said, In one example, Iranian actors posed as activists online to encourage protests over the conflict in Gaza, DHS said….The DHS assessment anticipates Russia, Iran and China ‘will use a blend of subversive, undeclared, criminal and coercive tactics to seek new opportunities to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions and domestic social cohesion….The report said it expects domestic extremists to attempt violent actions ‘with the intent of instilling fear among voters, candidates, and election workers, as well as disrupting election processes.’

It is not only from the Russians, Iranians, Chinese (and North Koreans) that America can and does expect serious interference, incursions, and ‘cognitive war’ (borrowed by Nicolaidis above) from outside. There are nefarious, subversive and highly financed ‘puppets’ of this camrtpaign of deconstruction of the administrative state within the United States borders.

Writing in his substack website, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration, today writes:

Trump picked Vance for his vice president because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do: overturn democracy and place America under MAGA control. In a response to a question from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos put to Vance last February-‘Had you been vice president on January 6^th, would you have certified the election results?’- Vance said: ‘If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.’ In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant ‘more Democrat voters pouring into this country.’ In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to ‘transform the electorate’ amid an immigrant ‘invasion.’ Echoing the so-called ‘great replacement theory,’  Vance told voters, ‘You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.’ In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny them to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in America…..Thiel (Vance’s financial puppet-master) and Vance-along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement believe that the only way true libertarians can win in America is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the American establishment and instal a monarchical regime, run like a start-up.

 

Both Netanyahu and Putin are thumbing their noses at Biden (and Harris-Walz by inference) daily, hourly and with impunity. The U.S. is providing both offensive and defensive weapons and military materiel to Ukraine and allegedly only defensive weapons to Israel. Meanwhile, the wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine, both deeply implicated in, and ignited by terror, Putin’s and Iran’s proxies, rage on right in the faces of all of us watching as our personal anxiety grows, if and when we venture into the speculation, ‘Where is this all going to lead?’

Having the most powerful and best-equipped military arsenal in the world’s history, is clearly not protecting the American election or its people from savage and perhaps even existential invasion. Even the most technically advanced homeland security apparatus in the world’s history is being penetrated daily, hourly by state actors, enhanced by the actions of deeply and intractably irate over years of what they consider oppression.

In the U.S. itself, both far-left and far-right activists are highly amenable to influencers that trigger their own intense attitudes, whether in support of Israel’s ‘right to defend’ herself, or in support of the Palestinian cause of liberation. The other Middle East nations, reportedly, do not ally with Iran, and yet seem unwilling or unable to tamp down the Iranian regime’s obsession with obliterating the state of Israel. Similarly, far-left and far-right activists in America are deeply divided about support for Ukraine in its illegal invasion from the Russian tyrant.

Harris and Walz, decent, articulate, committed, sincere and moderate political ‘sacrifices’ on the altar(s) of this cauldron of openly festering, boiling over and potentially consuming conflicts, are visiting the devastation wreaked by hurricane Helene in the American South, as is Biden, while the American people watch Vance morph into mr-nice-guy and Walz trip him on his refusal to acknowledge that trump lost the 2020 election.

When facts, truth, and decency are being replaced by lies, contempt, hatred, bigotry and self-aggrandizement, under the guise of ‘protection,’ the demographic ‘great replacement theory’ along with the Cultural Theory may be washed overboard in the great tsunami of international geo-politics of the most heinous, ambitious, immune-deficient, and openly destructive geo-military-cyber-security invaders of all history.

As I once retorted to an abusive parent when she asked, ‘Why do you think I beat you?’ “I guess you could not talk!”

Violence is much more sexy and dramatic than talking, especially among those who consider their positions absolutely ‘correct’ and without any need for adjustment.

Absolutism, however, is neither an ideology nor a theology, in spite of the centuries-long attempt of the churches to make it so. Moderation, talking, negotiating and compromising, however, have no place in a world dominated by the absolutists, irrespective of what it is they are absolute about. Bombs, missiles, drones, cyber invasions, dis-and-mal-and-a-information continue to weaponize, demonize, and eviscerate democracy, decency, integrity, honour and dignity, not to mention human rights, and the lives of millions of innocents.

And this screaming tirade will do nothing more than sticking my hand in a bucket of molasses to the bucket of hate in which we are living, except cover my hand with molasses, and certainly not alleviate the hatred that has the world in its claws.

cell913blog.com #80

 The notion that the pain, suffering, anxiety, sickness, old age and death are the stuff of the ‘soul’ will come to many orthodox Christians as any one or more of a list of discomforting adjectives: morbid, dark, unpleasant, Buddhist, Taoist, tragic, heretical or even a mental illness. The Christian church seems tied to and locked onto the treadmill of its dogma of some form of salvation, as a path to contending with, or possibly even avoiding inescapable death, or winning the ‘eternal life’ lottery in the final warning for Judgement Day and a final holy sentence.

As the antithesis of life, and life given and sanctified by God, as the Christian perspective holds, then how could an appreciation of death, from a different perspective, one that acknowledges its inescapable connection with everything we think, say, and do in our life, be compatible with such a ‘holy truth and reality’?

Bifurcating death and segregating it and all of its implications, connotations, ramifications and imaginative overtones, from ‘life’ writ large, limits by restricting and constricting one’s perspective; it also offers a highly righteous, and yet fallacious, binary foundation for all other metaphysics, epistemologies, belief systems, and psychological perspectives.

The very difference between ‘knowing’ as an absolute foundational truth, and ‘unknowing’ as its erroneous, untenable, unimaginable, heretical, apostatical, sinful perception and belief, lies at the core of the Christian theology. Perhaps this observation applies more, if not exclusively, to the manner in which the Christian faith is prosletyzed, practiced, preached, and awarded and rewarded, within the ecclesial edifices than to its more mystical, ephemeral, ambiguous and transcendent aspirations.

The cognitive, emotive, imaginative capacities celebrated and idolized by our contemporary culture have come to be embodied in left-brain language, literal and empirical evidence, and the persistent and pervasive verb “to do.” So long as we are ‘doing’ something about whatever pain, anxiety, discomfort, loss, and even the formal palliative preparations for death itself, we are ‘individuating,’ and climbing Maslow’s ladder to self-actualized wholeness. As conscious, attentive, energized and ‘performing’ humans, we have the stamp of acceptance and approval of our culture, including our parents, teachers, professors, mentors and shamans.

Even our clergy, and certainly our marketing guru’s and our corporate and learning organizations and institutions, view and evaluate our ‘performance,’ based on our behavioral, physiological, emotive and social ‘actions.’ This perspective and its concomitant attitude of judgement extends even to our facial expressions, our body language, our wardrobe, hairstyle, and whatever relevant ‘signs’ and signals of our success and/or failure, depending on the person or organization perceiving and judging. And the various ‘lenses’ through which we ‘perceive/judge,’ is formed by a variety of other ‘performances of our parents, teachers, and others.

As Jung reminds us, if we are unsure ‘who’ we are when asked, the world will ascribe an identity to us.’ And we spend our lives trying on various ‘identities’ based on the mirror’s reflections from others’ impressions. Almost as if we were unconsciously morphing our associates, friends, classmates, co-workers, teachers, and mentors into the ‘directors’ (screen writers? secret role models? idols?) of our ‘life roles,’ as actors in our own ‘stage play,’ we come to depend on, even rely on and expect those ‘impressions’…even if and when they directly confront some interior perception or belief that has somehow made its way into our imagination and our fantasy.

The drama of those events, people, achievements, failures, families, houses, degrees, careers, that occupy our minds, hearts and bodies for, it seems, at least a half-life, (40-50), have a cumulative impact and what for some may seem like a ‘dead-end’ road, or something approximating a significant change in direction, motivation, structure, or belief and perception.

Flooding what are termed ‘extrinsic’ motivations into children, students, workers, athletes, for many, has the potential impact of relegating ‘intrinsic’ motivation (personal desires, ambitions, visions and fantasies) to a secondary and supporting role. Even the spectre, (promise? assurance? reward? award?) of an afterlife in heaven, where the streets are paved in gold and where no conflict exists imitates the (or is it imitating) a deeply embedded modality of classical conditioning. This classical conditioning serves as a template for organizations, including families, schools, workplaces of every variety, providing hierarchical ‘means’ of motivating, to produce desired results.

The convergence of such ‘extrinsic’ motivations, while relatively easy to imagine, design, deliver (and withdraw) can eventually seem empty and hollow. The English humorist, Terry Pratchett, is reported to have authored a profound insight: “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”

So deeply imbued, steeped and virtually drowning, as Christians, in the notion of death as contrary to, even defiant of death, and so culturally embedded in a binary of opposites, we are not only loath to open the door of our imagination to the prospect that everything we think, say, do, and imagine has something to do with death.  Mortality, rather than a venomous, nefarious, Satanic monster, is, if we were to acknowledge its psychic and inescapable ‘image’ is a constant in our lives. The Greeks had their Hades, their god of the underworld. There he ruled with his queen, Persephone, over the infernal powers and over the dead in what was often called ‘the house of Hades,’ or simply Hades. He was aided by the dog Cerberus. Though Hades supervised the trial and punishment of the wicked after death, he was not normally one of the judges in the underworld, nor did he personally torture the guilty, a task assigned to the Furies. Hades was depicted as stern and pitiless, unmoved by prayer of sacrifice (like death itself). Forbidding and aloof, he never quite emerges as a distinct personality from the shadowy darkness of his realm. (From Britannica.com)

And from theoi.com: He presided over funeral rites and defended the right of the dead to due burial. Hades was also the god of the hidden wealth of the earth, from the fertile soil which nourished the seed-grain, to the mined wealth of gold, silver and other metals.

The question of the timeline of Greek mythology and it relation to the Christian view of death, is one for another time. The Christian view of death, however, is not.

Death is at the very core of the Christian religion. Not only is the cross to be found in cemeteries and places of worship alike, but the premise of the religion is that, by their own action, humans have forfeited immortality. Through abuse of the freedom granted in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve not only sinned and fell from grace, but they also transmitted sin to their descendants: the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. And as ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Romans 6:23), death became the universal fate.‘Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men’ (Romans 5:12) Christian theologians spent the best part of two millennia sorting out these implications and devising ways out of the dire prognosis implicit in the concept of original sin. The main salvation was to be baptism into the death of Jesus Christ (Romans6:3-4) (from Britannica.com)

Rather than attempt a sorting out of the implications of the Christian marriage of sin and death, separating a psychological connection to and relationship with death from a Christian theology of sin and death seems more accessible and perhaps even more relevant.

 In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman writes this about theology and death.

Theology has always known that death is the soul’s first concern. Theology is, in a sense, devoted to death, with its sacraments and funeral rites, its eschatological elaborations and its descriptions of heavens and hells. But death itself is hardly open to theological inquiry. The canons have been laid down by articles of faith. The authority of priesthoods draws its strength from canons that represent a worked-out position toward death. The position may vary from religion to religion, but it is always there….The anchor of the theologian’s psychology, and his authority, is his doctrine about life after death. Theological proofs for the existence of the soul are so bound to cannons of death—canons about immortality, sin, resurrection, last judgement—that an open enquiry brings into question the very basis of theological psychology. The theological position, we must remember, begins at the end opposite to the psychological one. It starts from dogma, not data; from crystallized, not living, experience. Theology requires a soul to provide ground for the elaborate death belief system that is power of its power. …The viewpoint of the natural sciences, including medicine, is more like that of theology. It is a fixed position toward death. This view shows signs of modern mechanism: death is simply the last of a chain of causes. It is an end state of entropy, a decomposition, a stillness…..Images of dying, such as running down, cooling, slowing, stiffening, fading, all show death as the last stage of decay. Death is the final link in the process of aging. (Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, pps. 47-48)

And then, following a psychological/philosophical perspective, Hillman writes:

Life and death come into the world together; the eyes and the sockets that hold them are born at the same moment. The moment I am born, I am old enough to die. As I go on living, I am dying. Death is entered continuously, not just at the moment of death as legally and medically defined. Each event in my life makes it to my death, and I build my death as I go along day by day. The counterposition must logically also follow: any action aimed against death, and action that resists death, hurts life. Philosophy can conceive life and death together. For philosophy they need not be exclusive opposites, polarized into Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, or Menninger’s Love against Hate, one played against the other. One long tradition in philosophy puts the matter in quite another way. Death is the only absolute in life, the only surety and truth. Because it is the only condition that all life must take into account, it is the only human a priori. Life matures, develops, aims at death. Death is its very purpose. We live in order to die. Life and death are contained within each other; complete each other, are understandable only in terms of each other. Life takes on its value through death, and the pursuit of death is the kind of life philosophers have often recommended. If only the living can die, only the dying are really alive. (Hillman, op. cit. p. 49)

Albeit these perspectives form the foundations of Hillman’s thesis that suicide is a legitimate human decision, from the perspective of archetypal psychology. In that vein, analysts are tutored in setting aside any preconceptions, attitudes, beliefs and/or biases about their attitude and belief about death, including the potential imminent death of a person contemplating suicide. Providing a safe, secure, non-judgmental time and space for the person, irrespective of the final choice, nevertheless, offers an experience that, one can only guess, escaped the person throughout his or her life: having the darkest, most hopeless, most isolating, alienating and desperate images, visions, voices and endings.

And, as Hillman holds throughout his writings, he encourages both analyst and desperate man or woman to dive directly into the symptoms, the images, rather than attempting to ameliorate, mediate, medicate or rationalize those symptoms. Go all the way to the depths, the psychic underworld, safely, supportively, non-judgmentally, and then, as Hillman posits, the ‘subject’ potentially and perhaps finally vents and hears and reconsiders which dark voices, myths, gods or goddesses, ‘have him’ (or her) in their grasp. S/he may still, after such a ‘dive’ into a world previously out of reach for a variety of reasons, impediments, distractions, dissociations, denials, fears, decide to end his/her life. And, according to Hillman, the analyst need not recriminate or succumb to guilt in that instance.

Is there ‘room’ or a place in the Christian belief, attitude and dogma for such a re-visionist notion of suicide, including the psychological notion that death and birth, death and life are intimately, intricately, inherently and inseparably linked in the psyche?

According to the pro-life movement on abortion, the answer is a resounding “No.” There will be those too who argue that Hillman’s perception and attitude that all the events in our lives are connected to death is nothing more or less than a rationalization or an excuse for those wishing to end their own life. Some will likely argue that such a view is a rationalization for depressive states.

The individual’s invitation to release the psyche from its heroic ego that must ‘resolve’ all traumas, depressions, psychological abnormalities, however, in favour of an imaginative, poetic, mythic lens on turbulent, troublesome and traumatic moments continues to hold relevance, promise and insight, without the specter of instant gratification, healing and ‘uprightness’ or even righteousness.

And that option could serve us individually and collectively if it were to be fully grasped, engaged and experimented.

cell913blog.com #79

In another life, I encountered the Jungian term, enantiodromia, in reference to the persona (mask) fusing with the ego, replacing whatever individual identity was inherent and innate in the individual. An example would be a role taking over the identity of a person, in a process that seems both imperceptible to that individual, and to which that individual might actually succumb. This is not a foreign notion, once we become aware of it and it’s potential. Marriages often suffer from the enantiodromia within one of the partners, and the ‘performance’ of the persona unconsciously overtakes the individual’s life and quite likely, the marriage itself. As one who, on reflection, may well have fallen into the trap of my own enantiodromia, in mid-life, and then discovered the dynamic in the lives of others, I was brought up face-to-face once again with these words:

In 1996, while being interviewed by Wes Nisker,* (James) Hillman said, We are in a time which Jung referred to as the ‘enantiodromia,’ a term from Heraclitus, when things change into their opposites and virtues become vices. That’s what happens at the end of a great period of history. People will cling to the old virtues, but they’ve now turned into vices and have to be abandoned. But if you abandon the old virtues, you are lost and don’t know what to believe in.

The 2000 years that preceded this was the great expansion of the West, and the age of the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet these three salvational prophecies with their tremendous aesthetic accomplishments and enormous civilizing effects have turned into monsters in their self-absorption with their righteousness and orthodoxies. They lack insight: all three claim to be ‘the one’.

In a talk given at Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2000, Hillman argued: ‘The better the intentions, the shorter the road to hell. At a time of enantiodromia, the Devil and Christ change places…Whatever constructive vision we aspire to must be accompanied all along by deconstruction of our own motives, our own subjectivity, our biblical righteousness. For we are each and all, willy-nilly, like it or not, children of the Biblical God…If the Bible is fundamental to our kind of consciousness, then we must read it, learn it, know it and see through it. (Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Vol. III, Soul in the World, New York, 2023 p, 637)  

*Wes Nisker (from wesnisker.com) was an award-winning broadcast journalist and commentator, a respected Buddhist meditations teacher, a best-selling author and a standup Dharma comic who has been described as ‘masterful at using humor to lighten the enlightenment journey.

In the West, we have been fed a diet of Christian stories, central to which are the birth and death stories of Jesus. Casting death in the pall of the Judgement Day, at which moment we will all be judged according to our embodiment of the ‘Christian ethic’ of having emptied, or turned over our human will to the will of God. And through the grace of God, and the Crucifixion/Resurrection of Jesus the Christ, our sins will be (are) forgiven. Believing in the ‘truth’ of this Crucifixion/Resurrection story, similar to the immaculate conception/birth of Jesus, half-man, half-God, we have been, hypothetically through prosletyzing and ‘conversion,’ introduced and welcomed into the state of mind, heart and spirit of discipleship, as ‘converted’ Christian disciples.

The mystery in between both the ‘narrative’ of the literal events and their numinous, ephemeral, ethereal mystical, incomprehensible qualities, however, becomes ‘flattened’ in that the dogma and the discipline of embracing and absorbing the supremacy of the conviction of the literal obliterates the mystical.

Hillman puts it this way:

In the kingdom (or is it the mall?) of the West, consciousness has lifted the transcendent ever higher and farther away from actual life. The bridgeable chasm has become a cosmic void. The gods have withdrawn, said the poets Holderlin and Rilke; it takes a leap of faith, said Soren Kierkegaard. Not even that will do, for God is dead, said Nietzsche. Any bridge must be made of superhuman proportions. Well, that kind of bridge our culture has ready to hand: the greatest bridge, some say, even constructed between visible and invisible: the figure of Jesus Christ.

Once invisibility has been removed from backing all the things we live among, so that all our accumulated ‘goods’ have become mere ‘stuff,’ the deaf and dumb consumables, Christ becomes the only image left in the Kingdom for bringing back to our culture the fundamental invisibility upon which cultures have always rested. Fundamentalism attempts, literally and dogmatically, to recover the invisible foundations of culture. Its strength lies in what it seeks; its menace in how it proceeds.

Christ as bridge (and isn’t the pope, vicar of Christ, still called the pontiff from pons, bridge) because the Incarnation means the presence of the invisible in the common matter of walking-around human life. A god-man: visible and invisible become one. (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 110)….

And then:

When the invisible forsakes the actual world-as it deserts Job, leaving him plagued with every sort of physical disaster—then the visible world no longer sustains life because life is no longer invisibly backed. Then the world tears you apart. Isn’t that the simple lesson taught by the withering and collapse of tribal cultures once they are robbed of their spirits in exchange for goods? (Hillman, TSC, p. 111)

For a long time, this scribe, and others, have divided/separated/‘Balkanized’ the invisibles from the empirical, as if they were two distinct universes, playing on, interacting with, influencing each other in ways that generally escaped both consciousness and cognition. (Isn’t cognition totally dependent on consciousness, I thought?) If some perceived such a perspective to be ‘self-righteous’ or ‘pretentious,’ or ‘presumptuous,’ that  perception and interpretation seems understandable, given that the perspective defies 'logic,' and 'cognition,' and 'empiricism,' and renders the perceiver ‘quixotic’ even delusional from a social, political and conventional view. Certainly, the Christian model, Jesus, the man-God, was out of reach, out of touch with the limited, minimal, even imaginative and cognitive belief system of many, including this scribe. Posited and evangelized as ‘the incarnation of the holy and the sacred,’ Jesus was the ‘ideal’ to be emulated, worshipped, and ‘followed’ depending on the various interpretations of discipleship, and the intentions of the prosletyzer. And in that ‘light,’ the archetype of the Crucifixion/Resurrection was central to a deep and seemingly indelible self-identity, as sinner, as rogue, as forsaken, as deeply damned and desperately in need of ‘forgiveness,’ ‘conversion,’ ‘redemption, and ‘salvation.’ And the ‘permission structure’ for that process, metaphorically, mythically, and religiously was first the depths of depression, guilt, shame and despondency echoed in the Biblical utterance of Jesus, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27: 45-47 and Mark 15: 33-34) Also, Good Friday had to be followed, according to the archetype, by Easter Sunday, the Resurrection and the hope and promise of forgiveness.

In Biblical ‘time’ it seems like a process of some 48 hours duration; in mythic or archetypal terms, it could take a lifetime. What has lingered, remained, as the archetypal image of ‘rising’ from desperation, (irrespective of how each individual experiences desperation, depression, and ‘intense darkness) is a rather ‘instant’ form of ‘recovery’ into ‘healing,’ ‘new awareness,’ ‘new insight,’ a profound psychic ‘aha,’ a profound ‘relief.’ From a societal perspective, this ‘transformation’ is perceived, conceived and valued as healing. And, as depression has become the substitute for Crucifixion, therapy has become the ‘symbol’ of ‘Resurrection. Some might say ‘science has replaced faith.’ (This perspective is borrowed from Hillman’s work.)

The ’instant gratification’ of how North America has interpreted and applied the “CR” archetype, however, is an unqualified reduction of many realities. Let’s list at least a few:

·      That depression is a kind of ‘sentence’ from which one must be freed

·      That depression has nothing to illustrate, explicate, inform, challenge or even to ‘gift’ the person suffering in its depths

·      That the lifting of depression, for example, is a credible sign of ‘conversion’ to discipleship of Jesus the Christ

·      That the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son is also the model on which Christian lives are intended to emulate, follow, and worship.

·      That depression is a symptom, from a medical perspective, of illness, of ‘psychological abnormality’ that requires ‘treatment’

·      That depression, having taken over the individual human’s mind, body and spirit, requires ‘intervention’ in the form of medication, therapeutic intervention, or religious conversion, as its ‘dragon-slayer’

·      That depression, once lifted, is and will be able to be thwarted in a similar manner if and when it returns.

·      That God does not wish his ‘children’ to suffer depression for an extended time, in keeping with the ‘sunrise’ of Easter Sunday morning

What if, for example, between the ‘darkness of Good Friday, and the Sunrise of Easter Sunday,’ from a psychic perspective, there are innumerable, incalculable, unknown, indecipherable, ephemeral, insights, over which this ‘slick’ and ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ cleansing passes without recognition, expectation, anticipation and encounter? Indeed, the darkest depths are our darkest and deepest mysteries, including the darkest mystery of all, death.

And what if, rather than jumping from darkness to light, through whatever metaphoric/healing/freeing and relieving archetype (religious, medical, legal, clinical psychological), we began to imagine a different psychic landscape?

In an essay entitled, The Power of the Mythic Image,  Norland Tellez, writing on the website of the Joseph Campbell Foundation,  September 24, 2024, writes:

Images are not outside of language, not even outside verbal communication; For hich caststhere is a direct relation between images (of depression, for example) and their meaning; they belong together as integrated wholes in the symbolic order. When e hear a foreign language, for example, we may have the jarring experience of hearing sounds without meaningful images attached to them. Without the resonance of images in our soul, we could not hear the song of the meaning in the vibrations of human thought. As Martin Heidegger put it, ‘Language itself is poetry in the essential sense (Poetry, Language, Thought pg. 72) that is, in the sense that language can reveal the essence of things. Hence he explains, ‘Language is not poetry because it is primal poesy; rather poesy takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry.’ (p.72)

Rather than external opposites, mythological images are internal to words, as mythos to logos and logos to mythos, in the full concept of mythology. We know that ‘non-verbal’ images have the power to speak louder than words. As structures of signification, archetypal images are core channels of meaning and imagination; they constitute the world wide web of our symbolic life as a species.

Archetypal images retrace the order of the collective unconscious; they express the cultural forms of a collective consciousness which casts its shadow on the reality of the social field where it generally becomes unconscious. The collective consciousness and the collective unconscious are one and the same. Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination. Combining the literal with the metaphorical into a single force, it is in the nature of the mythic to become historic.

Whatever constructive vision we aspire to must be accompanied all along by deconstruction of our own motives out own subjectivity, our biblical righteousness…as Hillman reminded us above.

Any thinking, perception, action, attitude

·      that is ‘extracted’ or ‘removed’ or disengaged from our motives, irrespective of how ‘nefarious’ they may be, or

·      disengaged from our own subjectivity (including our minimal assessment and identification of who we believe ourselves to be), and especially

·      detached from our ‘biblical righteousness’ (as exampled in the strict, literal, judgmental definition and depiction of salvation (from sin, guilt, shame)…

requires our uninhibited, unconstrained, and unambiguous dive into those normally hidden ‘undercurrents’. It is those undercurrents that, if we are honest with ourselves, (as Tellez reminds us) are not and cannot be separated from our consciousness, either as individuals or as part of the collective.

This is not only an ethical mandate; it is a psychological exhortation/pedagogy/insight to which the anima mundi in the United States, and elsewhere, can and would do well to embrace.

Pontificating as another image of ‘the one’ (to the not merely rhetorical, political and ethical inferential dismissal of the other) merely underscores an already failed posture of the three Abrahamic, Biblical faiths.

Even Kamala Harris, perhaps especially Ms Harris, has an historic and epic opportunity to ‘acknowledge’ the unconscious in her party’s vision of both the Oval Office and the future of the nation. 

cell913blog.com #78

Having just listened to Mary Trump described her grandfather as a ‘sociopath’ who considered all people ‘tools’ for the growth of his business empire, and then also describe her family as a family of ‘mysogynists’ in her interview with Jen Psaki on MSNBC, I suddenly ‘connected’ these two dots…misogyny and tools.

Albeit, in reference to the American economy, political culture and ethos, including the anima mundi, human resources have for decades, if not longer, considered the workforce in the same ‘frame’ as ‘raw materials’ to be ‘mined, processed, and disposed of as their usefulness came to an end. And a similar frame and perspective has spread like ink in a blotter (dating this scribe!), into the economies, politics, cultures and ethos of many, if not all developed countries. The pursuit of profit, the manufacture and ownership of the machines and the products they produce, have both far outweighed the significance of what is ultimately and tragically considered a ‘cost’ on the corporate profit-and-loss statement.

Whenever costs have to be cut, the first ‘disposable’ is human beings. Of course, there is a graduated scale of ‘disposability’ ranking in inverse order to the rung on the hierarchical organization chart, the lowest being the most disposable, with the highest considered only in the emergency of the public relations scandal or as a last resort.

Tools, to, the word Ms Trump uses for her grandfather’s framing of people, is exclusively a depiction that could and would come only from a misogynist. It is a male frame of mind that would make the link between the tool and the worker, from a variety of useful perspectives. First, it is purchasable, and thereby ‘owned’ by the executive; and then, it can be replaced with a ‘better model’ as soon as one appears, especially one that is more durable, less costly, and likely to produce more ‘product’ or ‘service’ while saving money; furthermore, it has no ‘ties’ of responsibility from the management, and as such is easily, freely and insouciantly dismissed with or without cause (even those phrases are recent legal inclusions).

So far, this argument has been made zillions of times by various advocates for workers, union organizers, social workers, and even economists. The last group has acknowledged the inverse proportion of not ‘seeing’ the full value of the worker and their lethargic if outright defiant attitude to their work. Absenteeism, hiding in the workplace, theft and other deviance from normal worker expectations are only some of the now clearly evident symptoms of what is essentially an historic management perspective on the drones of industry.

There are several roots to this deplorable, and unsustainable dynamic. And the relatively simple strategy of voting for and instituting unions, while somewhat effective, will never be able to supplant the deeply embedded, conventional and ‘class’ framing of workers as far less important to the enterprise than the executives, the engineers, the researchers, and the managers and messaging professionals. And here is where there is a case to be made that links misogyny and tools.

From the beginning of human history, the club, the bow, the gun, the shovel, the knife, the bucket, all considered extensions of the physical body, have been considered ‘primary,’ necessary, helpful, and worthy of mastery, especially by the men of the community. That is not to say that women did not use and master these tools; the recorded evidence, however, has come, again primarily, from the men who committed their stories to some form of record. The pen, and the brush, presumably along with the spoon, fork, cooking utensils came along as further imaginative additions to the survival of the family and thereby the community.

We do not need a litany of ‘tools’ in an historic timeline to establish the human dependency, reverence, amazement and commitment to design, create and both produce and distribute ‘tools’ that morphed into machines in the industrial age, capable of producing 'more’ with less physical effort, and at lower cost than the human hand. Thinking both of effectiveness and efficiency, two of the most influential guide words in a contemporary economy, embedding the notion of precision, accuracy, timing, quality control and elevated expectations into the design and operation of the machines, brought with that initiative, a corollary impact: that humans, too, could and would and even must be ‘more perfect’ especially on a moral and ethical scale. Indeed Lionel Tiger, the Rutgers anthropologist, in his The Manufacture of Evil, argues that defying biology, the culture that brough the machine also birthed a new (and both inescapable and unsustainable) requirement of ethical and moral ‘perfection’ that echoed, emulated and embodied the kind of precision and efficiency that ‘metal’ can be fashioned into.

Tied to these heightened expectations, requirements, judgements and their link to whatever God was the subject of worship, were the men, first and likely then the women whose ego’s were now subject to the kind of scrutiny, judgement, exposure and sheer intolerance, a level that can never be fully explained by the human instinct for power and control…over whatever and whomever it seemed to need to dominate. Implicit in that dynamic of judgement was the already embedded ‘power imbalance’ between men and women…the former ‘on top,’ the latter, ‘below’. The history of gender relations is not exclusively tied to the development of tools, machines and the moral/ethical framework that was concomitant with those developments. Neither can the gender question be totally excised from the ‘tool-machine’ thread.

Another accompanying trailer to the tool-machine-thread is the identification of effective, normal, respectable, honourable and highly ethical human beings with whatever they might produce, generate, create, build, design. This ‘doing’ culture, not only as a matter of identity but also as highly significant measure of ‘worth’ starts very early in the life of the North American child. Test scores, music festival awards, athletic medals, allowances for chores performed, monitored and evaluated and the transition into the ‘money-for-work’ economy. Classical conditioning, the kind of behaviorism that Pavlov developed with food and bell for his dogs, and Skinner advanced, while having application to some human skill development, falls far short as a legitimate and honourable ‘training’ model for highly educated, creative, sensitive and motivated adults.

Nevertheless, its efficiency and publicly acclaimed success, have made it a central ‘training method’ for corporations and governments even into the twenty-first century. Immanuel Kant has reminded us not to be the ‘means to another’s ends’ in a kind of warning against abuse by those with power over us. The detailed, intricate, onerous task of first identifying and then separating the ‘desired ends’ of one person or agency, and then of discerning how and why ‘the means’ (skills, experience, attitudes, perspectives, values and motives) that I might bring to that ‘end’ are or are not compatible is often left to both chance and need.

If I need work and an income, I will obviously be far less likely to withhold my ‘work’ from the expressed invitation and desire of an employer for my ‘skill set’ as the HR parlance puts it today.

Nevertheless, the identification of ‘doing,’ and ‘building,’ and ‘generating,’ and ‘producing,’ and ‘selling,’ and ‘persuading,’ and ‘deciding,’…..the list is endless has become a ‘measuring stick’ for what we call normality…and, it says here, a recipe for sabotage.

Universities have become machines training students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) to the death and demise of the liberal arts. We are complicitous in a culture whose aphoristic posters hung on the walls of classrooms back in the 1960’s which read, “Learn to Earn!” It was, and still is, the declared public and political definition of the purpose of learning to ‘earn a living’…as if earning a living were the highest and solitary purpose of acquiring an education. ‘Tools’ in the quiver of the employers, at best a reduction of aspiration to a function, fails to aspire and to inspire and thereby motivate ordinary adolescents to a more complicated, nuanced, critical and creative ‘vision’ of their adult lives.

The whole onslaught of brainwashing in a corporate, capitalist and elitist culture, given the highly successful billionaires at the top of the pyramid of income scales, renders not only the language, the perspective, the highly valued attitudes, aspirations and even the dreams of both children and their parents to a high-paying, highly rewarding socially, and exclusively gated-community life of a new and burgeoning elite. Their ‘achievements’ are so trumpeted, the numbers of billionaires skyrocketing, the eyes of our young so fixated on their role-modelling, that one mother, on hearing of the graduation from law school of one of her daughter’s friends, sardonically complained to her daughter, “See, now why could you not have graduated from law school like her?” To which her highly educated daughter responded, without skipping a breath, “So mother, have we not become successful enough for you?”

Competition for the so-called elite universities is ravaging some families’ psyches, depending on the feelings of adequacy/inadequacy of the parents. And from much anecdotal and research evidence, the inadequacy quotient seems to outrank the adequacy quotient. I once calculated the report card mark of a grade twelve student of Asian ethnicity at 58%. The next day he returned to tell me that he was unable to show his parents that report card and had ‘deliberately erased his grade.’ This scribe as a twelve-year-old hid the Christmas report card in order to prevent a fractious visit from two aunts over the holiday, after receiving only a 63% in History. The consequences of what was deemed ‘deception’ were traumatic.

“Performance anxiety” is only one of the many ‘descriptors’ that march up and down the streets of our neighborhoods, masquerading as ‘anticipated rejection’ in the event of a failure and the judgement that can and too often will follow a disappointing ‘performance.

Men, fired from their jobs in the dot-com-debacle, in Silicon Valley, continued to shower, dress and return to the workplace from which they had been fired…only to cower in a recently jointly purchased (or rented?) motorhome parked in the parking lot unable and unwilling to inform their spouses of their firing. Losing one’s job, as president Biden often reminds us, (a job is much more than a pay cheque, from his father’s memory), is for millions analogous to a death. It is the death of one’s identity, one’s self-acceptance, one’s social standing, one’s friends, and one’s hopes and dreams. It is also very often the literal loss of one’s family.

Riding the various expectations, conventions, identities, storms and deaths of millions of lives in North America is our fragile, individual, personal and highly sensitive ego. And it is not only our ‘fault’ that we succumb.

The ‘system’ is so stacked against us in the form of what we are expected to ‘produce’ and to ‘do’ and to ‘prove ourselves’ that we stumble, fall, and then have to pick up the pieces. Having come to define ourselves, especially the men of the twentieth century, as ‘doers,’ ‘producers,’ and ‘agents,’ and ‘salesmen,’ and ‘performers,’ of many kinds, we are both unable and unwilling to consider any other form of identity.

In a binary, highly judgemental, dismissive, social-media-generated, success-addicted/failure-avoidant, competitive social and corporate and political, not to mention moral and ethical ethos, it would be reasonable to posit that ‘resisting this strait-jacket’ of the performing ‘ego’ qualifies as closer to ‘normal’ and mentally ‘healthy’ than to fall victim to it.