Searching for God # 85

 Much of the ruminating that goes on before, during and after these pieces are scribbled, has to do with what some call ‘the opposition to dichotomous thinking’ that methodology underlying what appears to many as an obsessive-compulsive search for perfection. And then, to cloak this pursuit with a theological mantle, even a kind of halo, demonstrates multiple layers of blindness to our own defensiveness. Of course we are all inadequate, incomplete, and surprisingly paradoxical, while at the same time we are walking-talking-believing we are doing the right thing….whatever that might be in each and every situation.

Inserting God into whatever our purported ‘right’ thinking, perceiving, believing, as a way of ‘putting a halo’ on our own perceptions, attitudes and beliefs is, to put it bluntly, playing God…and the degree of unconsciousness of this inclination, leaning, preference and increasingly, certainty of being right forms a kind of crust of social, political, cognitive and even epistemological absolute truth to our thought and perception. Playing God, while busily denying that we are doing it, is, it seems to this scribe, a form of double-jeopardy.

We are all familiar with the single notion of ‘self-sabotage’ that comes from our many mis-steps, both conscious and unconscious, in which we have disappointed ourselves, embarrassed ourselves, and found the disdain of others pouring down on us like a drowning scowl. And the degree of the impact of such scowls depends on many factors including the relationship we had, or thought we had with the ‘scowler’ and our own relationship with previous self-sabotaging incidents.

Authority, its original sources, their trustworthiness, and our attempt to discern their integrity, authenticity and credibility plays a significant role in our attitude to our own self-sabotage. First, however, we have to recognize, acknowledge and both tolerate and even embrace our inescapable, inevitable, predictable and impactful collision with our own self-sabotage. Even the degree to which that tolerance is developed is a path toward releasing the iron-grip of psychic trauma that can and often does accompany moments of crisis in self-sabotage.

Our defensiveness perhaps can be scaled to our openness and consciousness of our inevitability that we will fall flat on our face many times. And, there might well be a positive correlation between our defensiveness and our acceptance and tolerance of our proclivity to screw-up. The greater our defensiveness, the more likely we are to screw-up. The more we are in denial that we are fearful, neurotic, timid, withdrawn or intimidated by our ‘anticipation of a situation’ (not its reality, as it has not as yet unfolded) the greater the likelihood that we will come crashing down on our own false pride.

And, in the midst of our obsession with binary, dichotomous thinking, perceiving and believing, we each continue to reinforce such a pattern on the universe we inhabit. Every day, we hear moans and cries to the effect, ‘We are so deeply divided!” The truth of that existential cry is undeniable. And the layers/causes/issues of the division are both growing in number and in depth. WE have become, in effect the polarities we deplore.

None of us is exclusively a liberal or a conservative. None of us is exclusively a success or a failure. None of us is exclusively a thinker or a feeler, an inventor or a legal expert. None of  us believes, privately and secretly and confidentially, that, whatever we ‘think’ to be the truth is either complete, absolute or unalloyed with our personal subjective interjections, whether or not we acknowledge those subjectivities. Indeed, no single piece of information is without both subjective and objective aspects….irrespective of our attempt to make that purity and perfection rule.

One of the underlying supports for this binary division of reality is our preference for pragmatism and action, as demonstration of our ‘worth’ our ‘value’ and even, in many cases our ‘identity’, Who we are, the question that pores like lava from the mountain of existential thought, has had many social and cultural, cognitive and skilled meanings and iterations over the centuries. Defined often by tasks, hunter-gatherers, warriors, mothers, fathers, teachers, craftsmen and women, traders, sailors, pilots, clergy, ……and the list goes on. These ‘role’ definitions serve, in a way as ‘flags’ to signal what we might expect if and when we encounter one a person in any specific role. Indeed, that might be all we ‘know’ about that person.

Similarly, reputations as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ students along the way have a way of clinging like a worn-out, unclean and somewhat smelly shirt, for those whose path has been strewn with mediocrity. And of course, the reverse is also true; how ‘surprising’ are the stories of those who left school and later turned out to be geniuses, inventors, creators, and leaders.

The degree of surprise, however, is enhanced by our cultural soil of our dependence and reliance and acceptance of the ‘binary’ in the first place. Ilia Malinin’s reputation as a ‘quad-god’ is, like thin ice on a late winter pond, shattered in a four-minute free skate that ‘no one saw coming.’ And the pressure that he acknowledged with grace, along with the grace he showed in congratulating the gold-medal winner from Kazakhstan not only comports with his ‘quad-god’ superiority, and reinforces that reputation going forward. No cry of discrepancy in the scoring here, as there is from the French judge in the dance pairs. Shock for many observers at the Malinin ‘fall from grace’ is cushioned both by the skater’s authentic and humble and graceful acceptance of his own reality…including the profound pressure of the Olympics, compounded inevitably by his previous three years of nearly perfect performances and the expectations that story line generated.

There is, however, a silent aspect to the superiority/inferiority dynamic that receives less attention than it might warrant. Something called reverse snobbery accompanies our binary approach to many perceptions and attitudes. First there is the stereotype of the rich condescending to the poor, similarly the educated condescending to the uneducated. And there is also, although less recognized and exchanged publicly, the inverse, in which the poor dismiss the rich as snobs, creating and enhancing the view that all rich people are snobs, when it is their inverse snobbery that is showing.

Sociological numbers play a significant role in our perceptions of our reality, given that numbers demonstrate patterns of predictability, a commodity revered by both politicians and corporate advertisers. Population groupings of higher numbers of a certain identity tend to generate an air of superiority among that group, based on nothing more than their numbers. In advertising, for example, the 25-45 grouping is the highest earning group, whereas those younger than that demographic and those older are less a focus of advertisements dollars and expectations. While that ‘makes eminent good sense’ for the business planning and marketing budget and decision making, and echoes a pragmatism based on expected and needed profits and returns, it nevertheless, underlines the ‘divisions’ not only of age groupings but also of social importance, political importance and social biases.

Racism, for example, from Caucasian to indigenous or from Caucasian to Black or Hispanic is both rife and clearly in evidence, especially among the law enforcement population. The inverse, prejudice of the minority against the majority is rarely noted, and yet cannot be ignored, given the weight of the oppression of the original biases. Historically, Jews have been the subjects and targets of deep and profound racism, and yet, none of us can deny that racism among Jews is also a reality. A question of whether Jews hate Arabs more than the inverse is one of those questions that brains much more creative and penetrating than this scribe’s are left to ponder. Likely an oscillation of hate between Jews and Arabs finds a preponderance of numbers and weight shifting depending on the moment and the latest war or invasion or bomb.

It is the devolving from the binary to the absolute, especially with respect to hatred, prejudice and contempt that seems most disconcerting and unnerving. American political prejudice and hate for immigrants, for brown and black persona, at the moment echoes the racial superiority and racial cleansing of the Third Reich. And that contempt, at the core of the American administration’s attitude and belief system toward the whole world, continues to ripple across the globe.

If you are not an ally of the current administration, you are assumed to be an enemy, and thereby potentially a target for punishment, incarceration, defunding (think universities) deportation, or ‘withdrawal’ (think Europe, Ukraine,) or colonization (think Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Venezuela? And Cuba?). There are no legitimate arguments for these ‘attitudes’ except the wanton, disabled and debilitating will of a single man. His embodiment of the binary, without anything close to a basis in thought, planning, future global governance in the public interest, seems to come down to a hollow, empty and pitiful and pitiable core self.

And his personification of each and every moment on X, that describes his every primal urge and instinct, gives encouragement to that very approach to everything about life everywhere. Bullying abounds, lies and deception along with a refusal to accept responsibility, strong-armed tactics embolden all of the insecure bullies that haunt the towns and cities, and what is in reality a grade-nine ad hominum spitball fight in the high school cafeteria passes as a Congressional hearing on the Epstein files, starring Pam Bondi.

Debasing the level of language, the level of debate the level of acknowledgement of reality, including official, public, and performative compulsion to ‘own’ and to generate the only truth that matters (to the administration) is a situation in which we have all participated in its seeding, and flowering. We have abandoned the paradox, the spectrum of reality and replaced them with a false and absolute certainty, which we all know is a lie of epic proportions.

But like the mascara and the wrinkle creams that are attempting to defy, and to deny the wrinkles of aging, we accept that lipstick can really cover up a pig….simply because we do not wish to acknowledge that we are as basic and as real and as unpretentious and as fledgling and stupid as that beloved creature.

Can we, or do we even want to, consider how and why we might like to abandon the individual and collective self-sabotage of arrogance, blindness, lies, and pretentions in whose web we are all ensnared?

Even first steps of such an imagining can be seen in the open-door welcome in deep and profound deference, reverence and silence of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Barbara Budde, of the Buddhist monks whose walk for peace of some 2300 miles in silence, and in all kinds and degrees of weather, silently shouted a sanity to which we might all bow in reverence. The paradox of their preferential mode of silence in a world going deaf apparently by choice and preference, demonstrates a model of re-thinking of our dependence and reliance, in complicity, on reductionism of ourselves, of our reality, and especially of God.