Searcing for God # 23

 How to bring force against the evil of retribution?

This was an issue, a couple of posts back, given the orange tyrant has claimed ‘I am your retribution!’ and he foments many of the issues America and the world are facing.

Retribution: defined as punishment for purposes of repayment or revenge for wrong committed.

The implication in the statement, “I am your retribution” is that America has been the victim of a wrong committed, and the then candidate for president is the payment of revenge for that wrong.

Of course, all things Biden, Democratic, and Harris, and any other name associated with the Democratic Party are ‘evil’ according to the source of the original quote: ‘ I am your retribution!

Detailing some of the so-called ‘wrongs’ would have to include the investigation into the Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, the impeachment trials and convictions, and the multitude of other misdemeanors, according to the current occupant of the Oval Office, all of which have embarrassed and shamed him, in his eyes.

Without ever using the word  ‘victim’ the current occupant of the Oval Office has attempted, by which amounts to a kind of magical disinformation and dissembling to wrap his arms around a shared unconscious archetype, the victim. Considering that such an archetype resides in the collective unconscious of the American people, given that individuals feel persecuted, powerless, and unfairly treated by others, outside of their control, and given the millions of votes he garnered in the 2024 election, that archetype holds considerable influence in that nation.

And given that every utterance, move, decision and executive order is inflated with the steroids of over-compensation, generating a kind of Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood extravaganza, and the ratings game on which the media is dependent, if it is not actually a slave to them, identifying with victimhood, has many sycophantic acolytes. Biologists ‘graft’ one sapling onto another, in order to generate a hybrid; a similar grafting of victimhood to a highly questionable, pretentious and fake Christianity, in order to evoke the sounds and images of holiness and the sacred, and the nation is in danger.

Add to the victim archetype, the dark side of that archetype: the need to perpetuate the archetype onto others through manipulation and bullying and the obvious generation of self-sabotaging social dynamics evident in rising prices, declining job opportunities, eroded national morale and optimism, and isolation among world powers.

The delusion of inflated compensated self-agency and power that accompanies a loud voice, more guns, red hats, and television and media outlets that serve as mouthpieces for the archetypal victim (and the cash cow it generates), threats, law suits, firings, deportations, royal dinners in Windsor Castle, red carpets in Alaska, rich friends/sycophants from the digital oligarchy, and the almost cult-like obeisance and exaggerated loyalty, (effectively sycophancy, a further iteration of the victim, and the spectre of more cash cows), has, like a cloud of swarming moths gasping for their last breath, enveloped the nation to the south of Canada, for the foreseeable future.

A nation of victims, obsessed with wreaking revenge, retribution and punishment on any and all whom that nation perceives as criminal, unjust, unethical, unwanted, of the wrong race, of the wrong religion, speaking the wrong language, (and the search for more targets of the obsessive-compulsive policy and practice of the current agents of the government (all of it signed into Executive Orders with the stroke of a black sharpie) will continue to take down all those who oppose its obsessive-compulsion.

Media outlets and talking head hosts, who complain about all of this treachery, deceit, lies, manipulation, defamation, law-suits, deportations, surveillance, and whatever other nefarious and heinous tactics and strategies that  have yet to be reported, ironically and paradoxically, reinforce the victim archetype. Now they have effectively become the critical parent megaphone whose child, the American democracy, its institutions, traditions, laws and conventions, is being pounded into asphyxiation, in a process designed and executed by the victim/bully whose identity has so “velcroed” itself to the collective unconscious.

Talk about a heavy-weight fight! Arranged, choreographed, manipulated, and sustained by one of the cheapest ‘tricks’ of chicanery imaginable. Deceiving an unsuspecting public into denying its own comprehension and apprehension and grasp, intellectual and emotional, as well as intuitive and experiential of the reality of their lives and their country. Talk about double jeopardy!

James Hillman in many of this writings points to the various cultural pathologies for which what he calls the anima mundi would be well served to be open to some form of therapy. Whether through family systems, or archetypal psychology, or even gestalt psychology, or even mirroring (Rogers) or even psych-drama, even a lay person can see and discern how, if there were motivation, need, urgency, and even commitment, a move out of perceived victimhood, and the ravages of its steroidal infusion into the collective psyche, would have to include a transformative shift to what, as parents, and teachers, and mentors and coaches might term, in general, a new maturity. This would necessitate an enhancement of personal and national self-esteem, taking and accepting responsibility for one’s self-and-other deceptions and manipulations, both of which as first steps would/could enable boundaries to be set, not only on a personal level but also on an organizational (thing government and media especially, as well as academia, and the churches). Airwaves would be cleared of the second-by-second twittering rambling of a deluded chief executive, legislators would defy, through such simple tactics as sit-ins, phone-deluges, advertising, lectures, editorials, and a relevant set of both policies and practices, including both tangible and intangible affective and cognitive deliverables.

The critical parent would give way to a health adult archetype, that dismisses the need for the victim, dismisses the need for lies and deceptions, the need for guns and fake religion, the need for tariffs and taxes and the sycophancy to the oligarchical new tech-titans. Of course, it would take time for this house of cards to fall, but fall it must. And it will never fall if we keep hitting it with snowballs on glass windows of office buildings or even bullets into the CDC, or even rifel shots into the neck of one of its acolytes.

To say such a prospect is unable to be either mandated or imposed from above is an understatement. It has to come from the bottom up; and as that is a pre-requisite,  it requires, demands, expects and promises a transformational shift in the national psyche, the anima mundi, from immature, dependent, hero-and-saviour-seeking-and-desperately-needing pettiness, petulance, vengeance, retribution and self-sabotage.

The shadow side of the victim, having emerged from the darkness of the underbelly of the national psyche, an underbelly we all have to both recognize and ‘tickle’ into consciousness personally, familially and even organizationally including especially the churches, (unleashing it suddenly and precipitously might be too catastrophic and undoing) has found its time to be brought into consciousness. The national psyche, both its collective consciousness and its collective unconsciousness, are ripe for a significant moment. And it will not arrive, as do no other significant transformational, metanoic moments, from the harping of a critical parent, no matter how seemingly judicious, ethical, moral, honest and self-righteous it considers itself to be.

Indeed, the critical parent, another embedded archetype in a nation believing its foundational archetypes are the inheritances of the Christian religion, (think Original Sin, and in America that is always categorized as slavery) may well be the precise opposite of what the nation cries out for. Force, especially in this case, is not appropriately delivered in self-righteous, legal, moral, ethical codes, or even in street or worse violent protests and assassinations.

A grown-up, self-respecting, sentient, optimistic and hopeful nation, looking forward to enhanced brotherhood, equality, justice, fairness, opportunity and the chance for everyone to find a legitimate place in that landscape not only does not need those deceptions, those lies and manipulations, armaments, and zero-sum games in its politics or its culture, or its education or social programs, nor in its judicial system….indeed such approaches, based firmly and falsely on the foundation of the victim on steroids, is inherently self-defeating, self-sabotaging, and self-asphixiating.

There is no oxygen there; no one can breath there; there is no blue shy there; there is no hope there; there is no humour or fun or even smiles and winks there (except those of the salacious and lecherous kind). And the editors and mangers of the major public media outlets, as well as the thinkers who guide and mentor influential thought leaders all know that the current divide, stale-mate, and about to be worse: conflagration, is no way to run a railroad….or a family or a nation, or a church….of any faith.