Searching for God # 29

 Merriam-Webster.com defines KARMA this way:

The force generated by a person’s actions held in Hinduism and Buddhism to perpetuate transmigration  and its ethical consequences to determine the nature of the person’s next existence.

Broadly: such a force considered as affecting the events of one’s life

A characteristic emanation, aura or spirit that infuses of vitalizes someone  or something.

For those of us who are not either Hindu or Buddhist, it is likely risky to attempt to embrace the concept, especially as it is applied to an individual’s life, and transport it into a metaphor for the civilization.

Living on the edge of risk, however, is a place and state to which I have grown more accustomed than I would have envisioned decades ago.

As a cause-effect notion, karma seems to foreshadow its own consequences. It seems that if one lives a good life, one’s next life promises to be happier and more gratifying than the first; if one lives not-such-a-good-life, one’s next life will be shadowed by the first life. And as a Canadian, living for decades in the shadow of the American cultural behemoth, I am increasingly imbued with the perception that, while every nation and person is embedded in his/her/its own denial, for various reasons, the American enmeshment in denial, like much of the rest of American culture, her denial is both epic and unmistakable. And, intuitively, it only seems to follow that such universal denial, analogous to karma, may have unintended and unplanned-for, unanticipated and even unwanted consequences.

Support for the American reliance on denial is found in James Hillman’s writings.

Let’s start here:

Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other’, where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about. A history of this habit of the heart has been exposed by Elaine Pagels (in her important study The Origin of Satan) as a disastrous, perhaps ‘evil’ essential, and inherent bad seed, in Western religious denominations, making obligatory as countermeasure their relentless insistence on ‘love’. (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 247)

And also:

The book, Mein Kampf, that (Hitler) wrote in prison in his early thirties, lays out the visionary project he intended to fulfil. The entire disaster is there in a nutshell for anyone to read. Yet the Jews, The Western statesmen, the intellectuals and democrats, the church, could not see the demonic. The dark eye that can see evil had been blinded by the bright hopes in human progress and faith in goodwill and peace.

Without a profound sense of psychopathy and a strong conviction that the demonic is always among us—and not only in its extreme criminal forms, we hide in denial and wide-eyed innocence, that openness which also opens wide the gate to the worst. Again: Note how political tyranny lives on a gullible populace, and now a gullible populace falls for tyranny. Innocence seems to ask for evil. (Hillman, TSC, p. 239)

Hillman references American biographical examples of men, heroes to many, whose lives relied on the notion of belief, especially its ‘pure persuasive power.’ The three men were named Thomas Dewey, Oliver North, and Billy Graham. Attempting, on reflection to account for a common denominator, Hillman writes:

Perhaps the one god that provides the common denominator here is just this habit of self-control. But not self-control as such; rather its shadow: control in service of belief, in particular, of a belief that required control over the shadow. This is abundantly clear in North’s statements of belief before Congress. There was an enemy to be faced: international Communism and the compromising that weakens the patriotic fiber of America. Things must be put in order. Dewey’s target was crime, the gangsters in the dark tenements of Manhattan, the Irish Tammany hall, the Jewish racketeers and the Italian mobsters and extortionists. Dewey was cleaning up America, remaking it on the model of his own fastidiousness.. Graham’s charge was the cleaning of the spirit throughout the world: his enterprise was called a crusade….Control over the weakness and evil in self, and control over evil in others go together: for Dewey, by convicting criminals to the penitentiaries; for North, by bombing the bad guys in El Salvador, Grenada, and Libya; for Graham, by beating sin and Satan through converting sinners to Christ. In all, belief justifies the control and the furor agenda with which the shadow is opposed, whether the shadow be Tammany Hall, or the mullahs of Teheran, or the Evil One himself. (Hillman, TSC. Pps. 266-7)

Denial of the shadow of both the individual and the nation, is a cultural feature that embraces the church, the corporation and the political theatre….No one does anything ‘wrong’ as was evidenced in Scott Peck’s search within the Pentagon for those responsible for the My Lai massacre…everyone claimed immunity, given that the decision, another of the heroic attempts to erase the communists (think North’s belief) from Viet Nam, was taken by a committee.

Echoes of this kind of misguided ‘belief’ are not restricted to the United States. Netanyahu is determined to ‘erase’ Hamas from the face of the earth, just as Hamas is committed to the erasure of Israel from the face of the earth. Seems to be a similar chant coming out of Moscow, to erase the fascists from Ukraine. And, of course, how could we miss the erasure of all criminality from the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta,  perhaps New Orleans, all of them governed by Democrats.

Meanwhile, the energy that encompasses the cultural commitment to denial, permits and insures the denial of global warming and climate change, at the official government level, as well as the impending business failures of many farmers suffering from the tariffs imposed on China, who, in a tit-for-tat move refuses to buy American soy and Canadian canola. The very official denial of the actual amounts of fentanyl coming into American over the Canadian border, and deploying of such denial as the cornerstone of American trade policy, is, it seems, tied to a similar kind of blinding belief that has risen to the peak of the American political theatrical façade. Are we watching a gullible public, raised on the promise of the hope of the improvement, even the ultimate  perfection of the “imperfect union,” by slaying the evils that offer another fake pseudo justification for ‘immediate, and total(itarian) action to eliminate ‘evil’ depicted and imagined in whatever visages fit the whim of the wannabe dictator?

As the cliché goes, DENIAL is much more than a river in Egypt!

Is the nation now in the grip of innocence, denial, manipulation by those desperate for perfect (yet pseudo) self-control, obtainable only through the absolute elimination of a perceived, personified evil monster, in pursuit of a perfectly executed national security policy, itself another denial of the facts that it is not immigrants, or refugees or asylum seekers that are at the core of the American criminal problem? Add to this the bombing of what are determined, without public evidence, to be ‘drug cartel boats from Venezeula’ in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, while denying the insatiable appetite for illicit drugs among the American people. Add to the list the denial that millions of Americans are living in conditions so ripe for revolt, conditions designed executed and imposed by various government and state decisions whose benefits are being eviscerated, while their harsh impositions are being enhanced simultaneously.

And, of course, American denialism, really a core political, psychological and even a religious regime, not only cripples the American anima mundi; it also gives both cover and enthusiasm for denial and avoidance in other places, under the rubric of exaggerated and ‘belief-driven’ actions of individuals themselves seduced by their own blindness and denial of their own shadow.

When a culture makes heroes of men who, for their own personal inadequacies, (impotence?) and who find ‘an evil monster’ to eradicate, and in both the denial of their inadequacy, and the fabrication of their own ‘definition of evil’ they are not only permitted but adulated for their heroism, what can we expect as the ensuing ‘karma’ from such a situation?

Many times, in this space, I have derisively told and re-told the story of the evangelist of my youth whose sermon, ‘If you are Roman Catholic, go to dances, to movies, use makeup and prepare meals on Sunday, you are going to Hell’…..and, yet, what is the difference between a military or a political or a self-declared (self-declared Christian) evangelist and this heretical, heinous and despicable theology? Add his bio to Hillman’s list!

And to call out denial, from the perspective of political critique, is to miss the deeply embedded betrayal of the personal denial of the shadow. And the two aspects of the same dynamic are unable to find space or time in the print or electronic media. The personal shadow is a subject, if it is permitted time and space at all, (universities have almost all barred the teaching of Jung and Hillman from their curricula) is relegated to the family pages, and excluded from the political talking class. Personal attacks on the current occupant of the Oval Office, however, continue, in another (perhaps less heinous) vein of being prepared and offered as a way to expose the evil of this man….this man who is a direct ‘karma’ of the decades of deceitful, deceptive and delusional social, political, corporate and religious norm of denial and presumed innocence that have ensnared the nation for decades, if not from the beginning.

Impunity, immunity, absolvement of accountability, lack of transparency, and outright default are all forms of betrayal….and as Jack Smith put it in his interview with Andrew Wiseman, from London, (words to this effect): I was putting forth an argument for a speedy trial because the public is entitled to justice, just as is the criminal entitled to justice, both in time and in decision.

The public is also entitled to a far more rigorous assessment, discernment and public and open discussion of the kind of hidden and venomous silence of denial and presumed innocence behind public decisions which, clearly, are not only not in the public interest, but decidedly against the furthering of the public interest, and even detriental to its survival….in the most wide and deep definition of that last word.