Questionnaire for men on critical moments in your life....

 As men, we have all faced critical moments, when we felt and experienced a turning point, when we decided to do, or to withdraw, or to engage, or to fight, or to commit to some adventure. And, while we might not have been conscious of the voices, stories, epithets, adages, proverbs, or even the penetrating lines from a parent, a coach, a clergy or a mentor that seemed to take on a prominence in our decision-making, nevertheless, on reflection, such voices were active in our imaginations, in our mind’s eye, and in our bodies, if we experienced them physically.

Not all of our decisions turned out as we expected; indeed, some likely turned out far worse than we had imagined, while others turned out far better than we could have imagined. As Kierkegaard reminds us,

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

In the interest of attempting to collect, curate, interpret, apply and make sense of many of the decisions/turning points and their guiding voices men have made, this is an opportunity for as many as feel moved to tell your story, (in fewer than 100 words) to begin some anecdotal research-gathering, as part of the further investigation of Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology in real lives.

Some examples of such voices:

“Men of my generation did not leave their spouse, believing that such an act was immoral.”

“I simply did not believe that the situation was ever going to change.”

“We had completely different ideas about what a ………(carrier, marriage, divorce, promotion, geographic move, significant purchase, parenting strategy, etc. should, could, must be.”

“I believed that my vocation justified my complete involvement, even if it meant my family had to sacrifice.”

She followed “Apollo” while I was more comfortable with “Dionysos”

(Apollo, god of divine distance, who made men aware of their own guilt and purified them of it. Dionysos was god of wine, vegetation, pleasure, festivity, madness and wild frenzy.)

“The voice of Venus/Aphrodite (goddess of love, beauty, prosperity, fertility and victory) was in tension with the voice of Hera, goddess of marriage, a deep and high-minded commitment to the civilization in my marriage.”

Ares, the god of manliness and manly qualities: men are fighters, most of a man’s emotions should not be public, a man is responsible for and to others seemed to be in tension/friction/conflict with the was always present in my mind, to the exclusion of other voices, including those of the goddess of women, marriage and profound and mutual love.

Respectfully, we ask that, after some thought, and without using your name or location (your age and gender would be very helpful), you consider responding to the following inquiry, the results of which will be gathered and reported back to readers of this space.

This is not a site for therapy, for coaching, for mentoring or for any form of professional counsel. It is a blog that seeks to explore masculinities, and to reflect on how those masculinities came to be, what implications they have generated and whether or not a different perspective of and by men, of their/our masculinity is either feasible or warranted.

The message space at the bottom of this page will provide adequate space for your considered responses.

 

Looking backwards at my life, I believe that I made this decision:

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

while hearing and paying attention to the voices/ideas/words/example/mentorship of________________________________________________________________.

In a similar situation today, I would make a different decision, _________________________________________________________________

For the following reason(s)___________________________________________________________

Taming the gods of war...another tilting at windmills?

 We often hear the adage, cliché, maxim that in order to continue to function, humans have to reconcile both the ‘good-and-the-bad’ as if to say that, regardless of what happens, both will continue to provide intractable tension and conflict..So, we must not only get used to the turbulence, for it is inevitable, and also adjust your expectations and perceptions that war might be eliminated from the planet. It wont ever disappear.

And literally ship-loads of ink have been poured into the study of, the details of, the motivations for and the probable outcomes of all wars. The humanitarians among us, cannot be anything but dismayed at the carnage in lost lives, twisted limbs, fractured and crumpled apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and the dismantled infrastructure for heat, water and electricity that is both visible and inexcusable in Ukraine.

Regardless of whatever percentage of Russian people support the war in Ukraine, the rest of the world, including both China and India one would hope, have or will take the position that ‘unprovoked and illegitimate invasions’ of national boundaries is a proposition that has to be etherized from the geopolitical lexicon. Note, however, that elimination of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, while attempted through various treaties and agreements, remains unfulfilled, incomplete and still a blight on the human psyche. Indeed, there is still evidence, or at least the perception that some of the most dangerous operatives/leaders/nations either have or strive to acquire lethal instruments and agents, as a matter of ‘self-protection’.

Indeed, the American ‘war budget’ is, at least publicly, based on the clear and unequivocal premise that it is essential for the ‘protection’ of the American people and nation state. Defensive posture, as opposed to offensive posture, however, in a world in which straight talk has gone the way of thousands of dead and obliterated species over the last few decades, has taken on the characterization of mere political rhetoric, having neither truth nor legitimacy. Like laws conceived, drafted, debated and passed, in order to ‘prevent’ heinous acts of the abuse of power, only to seed, to nurture, to grow and to inflate whatever state apparatus that has then been given ‘power’, there is a predictable, and seemingly inevitable over-reach among those charged with such ‘protection’.

The over-reach is so significant that one has to be either or both sceptical and/or cynical about the cultural roots of the need for such protection.
Rooted in the history of the human race, is the seed of fear. The ancient Greeks had a god named “Phobus” who represented panic, flight and rout, as well as a god names Deimos who represented terror and dread. Both were sons of Ares, the god of war and Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It can never be overlooked, too, that in Slavic mythology, Perun, was the “thunder god of the ancient pagan Slavs, a fructifier, purifier, and overseer of right and order. ‘He is representative of the destructive masculine force of nature.’(symbolikon.com). His actions are perceived by the senses: seen in the thunderbolt, heard in the rattle of stones, the bellow of the bull, or the bleat of the he-goat (thunder), and felt in the touch of an axe blade.” (Britannica.com) In China, too, Guandi, also called Guan Gong, or Wudi,

(is) the Chinese god of war whose immense popularity with the common people rests on the firm belief that his control over evil spirits is so great that even actors who play his part in dramas share his power over demons. Guandi is not only a natural favourite of soldiers but has been chosen patron of numerous trades and professions. This is because Guan Yu, the mortal who became Guandi after death, is said by tradition to have been a peddler of bean curd  early in life. (Britannica.com)

Some contemporary thinking and theorizing about the force and dark side of masculine force and power would shine a light on the deep roots of the abusive force in the lives of contemporary women. It is not surprising, too, that “Eirene, the ancient Greek goddess of peace, is less well known than the god of war, Ares, who in his Roman guise of Mars was an ubiquitous deity invoked by men who went to war.” (greekreporter.com)

Considerable contemporary chatter would have it that, if the world today were ruled by women, there would be no war, or at least far fewer wars and they would be far less lethal and brutal. In a piece entitled,” Women challenging war; a feminist lens on patriarchy and conflict,” (atlanticfellows.org) we read:

In our globalized world, violence permeates all spheres of life. From sexual and gender-based violence, to racialized violence, to larger structural and systemic violence, to economic inequality and disparity, all violence is interconnected. A feminist analysis of war allows us to see how all these systems of violence are interconnected. In contexts of violent conflict, gender is produced and maintained as an extension of the violence manifested within society, politics, the economy, culture and family structures. Dominant hierarchical systems of oppression maintain power relations such that gender roles not only persist, but intensify the divide between women and men. In such contexts of exaggerated masculinity and exaggerated femininity, and the normalization of militarism and daily insecurity in all spheres of life, it is immensely difficult to fight against harmful gender norms, stereotypes and patriarchal values….(A) critical feminist lens shows the extent to which war, violence and weapons are significant factors in the construction and maintenance of masculine identity and crucial for the continued functioning of  patriarchy-a system in which women are at best devalued and at worst, eliminated. If women are to enter military institutions and contribute to the perpetuation of war, their role will be merely to support masculine ways of being for the benefit of a patriarchy that will continue to oppress both women and men.

It is both risky and potentially reductive for a male scribe to take on destructive masculine models, like Putin, for example, or the American Pentagon, or the Chinese government, and even to ask politely and respectfully, for a critical re-think of the underlying fears, anxieties, and even the demons that lurk in the imaginations of too many men in positions of leadership. It is neither rocket-science, nor especially prophetic, to note that the pursuit of power, status, honour, legacy and authority has been a constant drive among men forever. What is not so obvious is that such pursuit, motivation, obsession and compulsion, however, is also a significant and irrefutable signal of an underlying insecurity. Indeed, much has been written and researched about the link between insecurity and the abuse of power among men.

The masculine stereotype of ‘alpha male’ is so deeply embedded in the culture of western and most likely also eastern political attitudes, that media too have come to reinforce the model as the epitome of good leadership. Biden “ordered the Pentagon to shoot down the Chinese balloon” when it would cause the least damage to human life. Decisive and forceful images of power, especially for leaders like Biden whose Achilles heel, in the eyes of the Republican opposition, is described in words like “too soft” and “too weak”…Some would even argue that Biden’s reticence, foot-dragging, cautious and protracted release of tanks, missiles and those to-be-hoped-for fighter jets, to Ukraine, indicates his spineless approach to the Russian invasion.

On the Kremlin side, the alpha-male, Putin, while beating drums of threats should German tanks enter the war, champions the alpha-male leadership model in a one-man-ruled-state.

Depicting this Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of the military (masculine) and the humanitarian (feminine) stereotypes, does little to tear down the psychic (and thereby the political, military, economic and nationalist) architecture/infrastructure/archetypes of past and current conflicts. Men are not only fully engaged as warriors on the battlefield; they are also fully engaged in the humanitarian effort. Women, too, while not specifically recruited by the Ukrainian forces, play a pivotal role in the effort to keep life-sustaining resources flowing to survivors.

One of the more notable aspects of the pursuit of power is the embedded perception that power has to have empirical evidence of acquisition. Epaulets stars, titles, a hierarchical structure of command, numbers of tanks, missiles, recruits, and, of course, territory. Deeply embedded in this last, territory, of course, is the disputed concept that many who live in Ukraine are in fact Russian in origin, in language and in cultural preference. That thread is one to which Putin clings, in his blind, hubristic and alpha-male pursuit of acclaim, honour and status in the history books. His unveiling a statue of Stalin just this week is another piece of information that indicates his dream, in emulation of the heinous Russian tyrant.

While there are those who argue with justification that such issues as LGBTQ rights, and both racial and gender equality are among the perceived cultural demons from Putin’s perspective (as well as from the perspective of American far-right Republican voices), hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children have died, and many thousands more will likely follow before this war ends.

Pleading for peace, for the institution of war crimes legal charges in the courts, and for the maintenance of adequate food and oil and water for Ukrainians and for all Europeans, while legitimate, will likely leave but a small dent on the Putin breastplate of hubris. Indeed, such pleas might well serve to enhance his motivation to complete his scorched-earth approach to Ukraine. The Cuban missile  crisis was de-escalated through tough, armed and credible diplomacy. Such diplomacy depended on both the willingness of Khrushchev to climb down from his hubristic perch of installing those missiles in Cuba and the sensitive and calculated and sophisticated decision of the Kennedy administration to leave the Russian leader room to withdraw without losing face completely.

Those conditions, in their gestalt and in their intimate detail, are absent here and now. Putin is no Khrushchev, and neither Biden nor Lloyd Austin replicate Kennedy and McNamara. The conditions, too, at the political, economic, technological and international levels, today are far different from those in 1961. American credibility, international trust and reliability have all been undermined by the forces of conspiracy theories, a former president who bought into and supported those conspiracy theories, and a large segment of the American population who have drunk the same Kool-aid.

We are collectively in the throes of such a tectonic and rapid shift in language and culture, at home and around the world, where words have been both weaponized and stripped of their meaning and value, in imitation of Orwell’s newspeak, that, it is not a stretch to imagine that no leader is about to trust the words of another leader, especially leaders, like Zelensky, whose nation’s fight for survival is still not fully embraced as the fight for the free, democratic and rights-based governance. Depicting Xi Jinping and Putin, and Orban and…and…as demonic tyrants, while generating considerable public support, will only enable their strongest and most dramatic moves, potentially in league. And no god of war encased in whatever supersonic, high-tech weapon, even unconsciously embraced by any or all alpha-males is likely to be subdued, restrained and brought to peace and/or justice in the foreseeable future.

Just as we have faces on our demons, so too Putin et al have faces on their demons. And for each side to be the demon of the other neglects the inner demons and the inner daemons among all sides. Is it too much to speculate that Putin might come to a conscious perception that his war is destroying the very land and people he seeks to include in Russia? Can Putin be expected to detach from the Russian obsession with military conflict, perhaps as a role model for the rest of the world, thereby ensuring Russia of a place of honour at the world’s tables of power? Can the American military behemoth start to reflect on just how inflated, exaggerated and over-propagandized it has become among the American populace, and start to see the legitimate limits of its power?

Masculinity, in its raw unleashed deployment is a sabotage not only for the specific purpose it has been deployed, but also for all of the men on the planet. And, only in and through a significant transformation of perceptions of both legitimacy and collaboration, in a world of finite resources, will our children and grandchildren even survive. And it will not matter whether those grandchildren bear the names of Biden, Putin, Xi Jinping, or Zelensky.

Failures of a Type A parent: mea culpa!

 There is a central proposition around the act of being a parent, that articulates, ‘a parent is only as happy as his/her most unhappy child’. Obviously this is an American epithet, where the pursuit of happiness has been embedded in the cultural code. Nevertheless, even outside the U.S., the linkage - inevitable, inescapable, and perhaps even insurmountable- between a parent’s sense of self and the depth of unhappiness of his/her children cannot be denied. Hugh Jackman and others are now playing in a new movie entitled, “The Son.” The movie follows Peter whose hectic life with a new infant and partner is upended when his ex-wife, Kate (Laura Dern), shows up at his door to discuss their son Nicholas’ mental health struggles. On TheHollywoodreporter.com, reported in a piece by Christa Pina, January 17, 2023, entitled, ‘Hugh Jackman Says Filming ‘The Son’ Made Him a ‘Different Parent,’ Jackman is quoted as saying, “Every scene is this terrifying fear as a parent where you don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to help. You’re doing your best. Everything seems to not work…My father passed away during filming, and I think I was just confronting a lot of things as past parent, fears that you have.”

Kate Taylor, writing in The Globe and Mail, published yesterday (January 17, 2023) in a piece entitled, “Hugh Jackman-starring drama The Son is a cruel, tolerance-testing affair,” writes:…The Son is more interested in the impact an adolescent’s withdrawal and pain has on his divorced parents, most especially his father….(T)he film’s perspective is largely that of the father, Peter, a highly successful Manhattan lawyer played by Hugh Jackman. This A-type personality is preoccupied with his work, his pretty young wife and their new baby—but he also is such a rational and self-confident character that he finds it impossible to understand a young man who would rather wander the streets than go to school.  His initial reaction is that you can’t just do that, although he gradually comes around to the realization that he has to help his son, deposited on his doorstep by his ex-wife Kate who can no longer cope with the boy…..Anthony Hopkins steps in with a rather improbably cameo as Peter’s old father, in which he reveals he, too, abandoned his wife and son when Peter was a teen…

TWhile there will be innumerable far more penetrating, cogent and insightful reflections on this film, from others more professionally and personally schooled and experienced than this scribe. However,, personal experience of the impact of abandonment, and the deep anguish of participating in a broken family, leaving three daughters to their own devices, along with their mother, finds this scribe, decades later, struggling with the half-life of shame, guilt and sorrow that my own type-A drivenness, including blindness to both projection and transference and the psychic vice that such blindness can generate. However, my pain is minimal in the light of the chaotic sea in which three teen-aged daughters were forced to swim, following my withdrawal from the family.

The question of whether such deep and permanent family fractures can or will ever be mended, as if they were analogous to a broken femur, even one broken in several places needing plates and screws, remains an open puzzle. There are so many differences between a fractured femur and a fractured family. The femur is able to be captured on film, indicating the location, the dimension, the complications and the potential orthopedic surgical interventions to bring it back to strength, stability and stamina. The fractured family, on the other hand, is a complex confluence of both conscious and unconscious dynamics pulsating in the minds, hearts and psyches of several individuals. The competing trend lines of motives of parents in several directions, including engendering ambition, social skills, frugality, some form of spiritual and religious identification, and an introduction to the activities of both the arts and athletics all function, much like flowing and changing weather patterns. These many variables also depend on such variables as the mood of the moment, not only of the parents but also of the child(ren), the qualities and relationships of coaches, teachers, friends, and the various interpretations of those patterns, hourly, daily and over a longer stretch of time. One’s blindness to the transference of a mother’s voice to a spouse, and the blindness of my own and another’s projections, also unconscious expressions of something deeper than consciousness knows, are among the floating winds in which any family tries to navigate.Nevertheless, their choice to swim for the ensuing decades apart from at least one parent, is a choice to be both commended, for its strength, stoicism and endurance, and to be

“Success,” especially for type “A” men and women, is a highly volatile concept. And the implications grow both in intensity and complexity if both parties tend to be type A. In that situation, success carries the freight of how each parent has integrated previous notions of success from parents, grandparents, mentors, coaches and teachers of the past. It also includes, whether openly or more discreetly, dreams and fantasies of the parents that comes not only from their highest hopes, but also from their perceptions of the ‘height’ (metaphoric) of the potential of each child’s capacity. And all of this confluence of so many almost imperceptible rivers, flowing in and through the same kitchen and dining room tables, in and through the family room, and out into the wider world, can be and often are like ships passing in the night, without the benefit of radar, telling them where they are in relation to themselves as well as in their relationships with the others in the family.

The last half century, too, has been impacted by a variety of influences of the psychological fraternity, some of which have been effective in healing broken relationships, others not so much. None of those potential influences, naturally, were available to the children of parents whose kids were born in the 70’s. In fact, even the concept of seeking, or especially of needing, counselling, in those years, was a mark of considerable weakness, to be assigned and required by those who were in conflict with the courts, the school administration or the social services sector. Whether such services would have been helpful in forestalling a family fracture can only be assessed in hindsight, even if such supports were sought and tolerated and integrated.

None of us can escape the reality that, from the perspective of decades later, we all, each and everyone of us, could have and would have conducted themselves differently, given what we all both know and have experienced in the interval. However, living with the stark reality of brokenness, betrayal (probably more as betrayer than as victim), and the prospect that, as Jackman says of a line from the movie, “Sometimes love is not enough!”, many of us are left with the truth both of our own perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours, and the impact of those on others.

Reflections around how each of us failed, not only ourselves, but also others we care about, continue to fuel much of the perceptions, attitudes and words and actions are that we take to help us heal and to help us grow. It is only in and through every hour and day that we catch glimpses of light out of the darkness we have been in, and knit that light into the tapestry of our sense of self, another of the multiple, complex, flowing, growing, changing and also declining realities and truths and perceptions into our own sunset…personal biography.

It is our biography that, like a river flows in and through us, and in and through all of the situations, persons, projects and dreams and fantasies of our bodies, minds, hearts, psyches (and in and through all family members)…much of which we continue to protect from full disclosure.

In this moment, I am reminded of the Jesuit John Powell’s little book, entitled, “Why I do not tell you who I am”….answered by the freighted and legitimate reason: “Who I am is all I have, and if I disclose it to you, you might reject it!”  

For all of the drama, conflict, tension and disappointment in which I have been an active participant over the years, one of the constants is the unconscious, becoming conscious discipline of keeping my personal secrets, a lesson/habit/requirement and serious failure for which I am deeply sorry, that I developed from early childhood.

Keeping secrets, in order to present a public face of the kind of pride and upstanding family that went to church every Sunday, while things far less honourable were going on inside the home, was a kind of straight-jacket analogous to the mind of military discipline required of men and women in the United States Marines. While military discipline was not either understood or explained, it was effectively the ‘order’ of the day in our home. And the vestiges of its impact continue to raise their ugly head even today, although with far less influence and respect.

Sensitivity, compassion, empathy, and tolerance, including patience with both self and others, all of which ring like a hymn to the highest ideals, are not qualities that come in a store-bought package from Walmart. They are also not high on a totem pole of values among those whose lives are considered, by themselves especially,  to be examples of ‘competitive and stoic’ engagement and endurance. Sharing feelings, disclosing anxieties, taking time to listen to what might be said, behind the immediate need….these are all qualities needing deep and extensive steeping in and through experience, mentoring, modelling and both imitation and interpretation.

As a failed father, in many ways, I have only been introduced to the profound value of these qualities over the last few decades. That is not to excuse my insensitivity, my pride, my impatience and my stubbornness. Nor is it to escape the reality of having been a significant participant in the life-long pain of others, including three now grown adult daughters.

Apologies are not paving stones to forgiveness or reconciliation. They are merely internal reckonings with one’s internal life. And the internal life, far from the madding crowd, is really the only life that matters, when all is said and done. How does one come to consciousness about such concepts as enantiodromia, the fusion of the ego and the mask, when one’s performance is equated with one’s identity, and the process of breaking free of such an enmeshment? How does one separate one’s professional vocation, for example, and the multiple performances entailed in that pursuit, from one’s inner drives and motivation. Only much more recently have I discovered some of the thoughts and concepts that could/would have served my needs nearly forty years ago. One such insight comes from James Hillman reported by Matthieu Larsen Morava, from Archetypal Psychology in the Public Group, James Hillman – Archetypal Psychology on Facebook:

Vocation is a very inflating spiritual idea. One to one. God to me. Notice how our idea of Renaissance man is a polytheistic fantasy. He does all kinds of things. But vocation addresses the ego and makes it a specialist-then you ‘believe in yourself—and that’s another trap of that devil, belief – because who is believing whom? I am believing in myself-all ego, and then I have a mission. Now that fantasy of the farm is polytheist, and who is to say what is THE important thing of a farm: the man who buys eggs from me would like more eggs and sees the time I spend chopping wood a waste. ‘Have a secretary do it, You have the best eggs around, Produce more,, and even better ones.’ Specialization: the best egg man around; and that’s monotheism and mission and early death!’

And the public, vocational, professional life, to which I was so deeply committed, may have been little more than an illusion, both to and for me, and certainly to and for my former family. In my adoption of a role, mask and the ambition to fulfil that role, I actually thought and believed that I was doing what I was supposed to do, only to learn, like so many others, that being true to oneself, if and when one discovers who/what that is, is what matters.

The difference between feeding a public image and living a life of personal integrity, authentic and honest to one’s own identity, remains as both the greatest single lesson of my life, as well as its most significant disappointment. And, even though I consciously recognized that “something inside” kept my chained to the wheel of ‘work’, another accomplishment, performance, another column, another editorial, another advertisement, another interview…all of it consuming as many as sixteen-to-eighteen hours every weekday, I knew I had to get off the hamster’s wheel. Unfortunately, preparing for active ministry, and the anticipated process of reflection, meditation, study, prayer and intense supervision in pastoral education, as I perceived to be an antidote to the ‘wheel’, only changed the set of expectations, without altering the intense and dominating drive to perform.

Only after hitting the wall of exhaustion and rejection did I come to my senses, too late to make up for the many omissions as partner, father, friend, those essentials of a healthy bio. 

Gaps in public service oversight are unacceptable...yet rarely protested

 In the Anglican/Episcopal liturgy, there is a prayer seeking forgiveness for sins of both commission, and of omission.

So much of our public discourse focuses on the commission of acts with which we do not agree, for which we have little respect and for which we have a multitude of laws to “prevent” and to “punish” offenders, whether those offenders be individual persons or organizations. As a contrarian, I have often reflected that we might do well to turn some of that laser-focused attention from the acts to the omitted, and thereby less easily perceived, documented, proven and legally actionable gaps in our lives, in our thinking and planning and in our public perceptions of the public need and the public interest.

This piece, while to some will appear whining and picayune and pedantic, nevertheless attempts to shine light into the several ‘gaps’ in public accountability, transparency and even legitimate public expectations.

The pattern of ‘gaps’ could be conceived as deliberately designed, or more likely benignly overlooked by those who write and those who debate and those who pass legislation, generate regulations, and consider the need to enhanced discipline and rigor at all of those levels.

Let’s look at the question of whether or not the federal government is doing, has done, or will do more to lower the costs of cell phone service, given that three behemoths hold an absolute and long-standing oligopoly here in Canada. Sharing towers, nevertheless, is a clause that has been included in the licence of all three, although the federal authorities have failed to enforce that specific clause. The former owner/operator of Wind cell phone service, recently appearing on CBC’s Marketplace, says he had no idea of the headwinds he faced in inaugurating his venture. Now known as “Freedom mobile”, Wind simply exhausted resources given the market dominance of the three giants, Telus, Bell and Rogers. An NDP MP, also interviewed on Marketplace, says that the cell phone lobby is the most visible and influential on parliament hill. So, what are Canadians to do about paying the highest cost for cell phone service in the world?

Cansumer.ca reports in a piece by Alex Wideman, December 16, 2022, entitled, ‘Why are cell phone plans so expensive in Canada?’:

Canadians pay 20% more than Americans and 170% more than Australians on their cell phone place on average. For unlimited talk and text an d2 GB of date, we spend an average of $74/month, compared to $60/month in the US and $22/month in Australia….The Big 3 Canadian telecom companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) own 90% of the market and charge high prices due to a lack of competition. The lack of competition is due to a wide variety of factors including the industry’s high barrier to entry, restricted  foreign investment, limited access to the wireless spectrum, potential for price coordination and history of privatization and acquisitions…Year after year, the federal government studies the industry, acknowledges that prices are high, commits to new approaches, directs the CRTC* to prioritize the consumer, yet they capitulate when it comes time to assert their authority and decide in favour of consumers. The actions taken by the government and the CRTC over the years to address industry competition, affordability and consumer choice have brought about slow, impermanent or even regressive progress.

The depth and degree of “beholdenness”, or in ordinary terms, co-dependence, of the federal government to the “big three” is not only unconscionable but also inexcusable. However, given that the nation’s preference to muddle through, rather than cut through the bull-shit of the rationalizations, excuses and deferrals of the big three, is both legendary and shameful. On the other side, the degree of relative compliance, orderliness, politeness, and resistance to activism among the Canadian public not only permits, but actually encourages and fosters such negligence, even insouciance on the part of the federal government. In their ‘heart of hearts’ they know that the public will not be stampeding Parliament Hill in massive protests over such a minor public issue. Trouble is, however, that, while that gentile and negligent approach may have been somewhat tolerable, given how happy Canadians were at the inception of cell phone service, and the surprise and awe at the very technology itself, that early ‘bloom’ has come off the rose; and at the same time, rising inflation, interest rates, and growing public awareness of the  exorbitant differences between Canadian cell phone prices and those of countries considered similar to, analogous to, and thereby relevant to the Canadian scene, all contribute to the growing angst among Canadians.

Like so many other issues on the “plate” of the federal government, however, it tends to get lost in the ‘force-field’ of public issues and the relative detachment from politics generally among the Canadian electorate, except perhaps at election time. And even then, a mere 50-60% of voters actually turn out to vote. Wikipedia.org, reports: Voter turnout rose sharply in the 2015 election, at 68.5%, the highest turnout since 1993. Voter turnout has been on the decrease post 2015 and dropped 4.3% from 48.8% in 2019, to 44.5% in 2021.

We need and want both the CRTC and the federal cabinet to shift priorities from bowing and sycophancy to the big three, to enforcement of the shared tower regulation, as well as opening the doors to competition and investment in order to better serve Canadian people. And that does not include, infer or imply any opening of the cell phone networks to Huawei or China. And while, we in the neighbourhood, given that the U.S. and Europe have sanctioned or refused permission to TikTok, why is the Canadian government not actively considering a similar approach to that platform.

Jeremy Nuttall, in The Star, December 15, 2022, writes, in a piece entitled, ‘As
TikTok bans unfurl across the globe, some say Canada should follow,’ writes: Ottawa must investigate TikTok over national security concerns as more jurisdictions in the United States move on banning the controversial social media app based in mainland China, says Conservative foreign affairs critic, Michael Chong. Chong said the app’s reach and ability to manipulate algorithms and laws in China requiring companies there to co-operate with the government, including on intelligence operations, could present a national security threat to Canada…Pin the United Kingdom, the government closed its Parliamentary TikTok account over the summer due to security concerns. I:n Ireland, the country’s Data Protection Commission recently sent the results of an inquiry into the handling of children’s data to other EU members. A draft decision from the inquiry said TikTok is also to be hit with a range of fines, the Irish Times reported Nov. 24.

Another obvious, glaring and deplorable “gap” of regulations, supervision, monitoring and public ethics has surfaced in stories about the announcement of the closing of Huronia Guest Home in Stayner, Ontario. Cheryl Browne, on CTVNews.ca Barrie, reports on January 12, 2023, in a piece entitled, Ont. Assisted living home announces closure, gives residents 60 days to vacate’:

Leaky ceilings, rotting floors, little food and bed bugs were the conditions at Stayner’s Huronia Guest Home in which resident lived during the last few weeks before a whistle-blower blew the lid off their plight…..The facility is not considered a licensed care facility. In mid-2022, its owners terminated its domiciliary care funding contract with the County of Simcoe…However, the County of Simcoe said it doesn’t have the legal or regulatory authority to intervene. A spokesperson from the Retirement Homes Regulatory Authority which oversees retirement homes under the Retirement Home Act, also stated it has not authority over the site.

Stories about public officials ‘taking care’ to attempt to find new places of residence for these displaced both residents and workers, while decent and honourable, do not substitute for the glaring lack of oversight, supervision,  monitoring, reporting and even enforcement of minimum standards of decency, cleanliness, nutrition and care in this home, and what is worse, this is likely only the tip of the ‘iceberg’. While the Stayner story concerns a “guest house” and not a licensed Long-term care home, under the act, (and even that omission, both on the part of operators and provincial authorities, speaks volumes about the public hierarchy of responsibility and care for people on the verge of homelessness. Oh, but there is no political retribution from the homeless or the near-homeless! Sorry, UI forgot!)

Of course, COVID exposed glaring inadequacies in both care and facilities in long-term care homes. However, while that exposure garnered some public attention, the matter of care for indigents, at all levels of their existences, has been ignored for decades if not longer, at least in Ontario. In 2020,  according to a report in the National Post, an independent commission on  the long-term care sector point(ed) the finger in a scathing report at governments past and present for thousands of COVID-19 deaths at the province’s nursing homes.’ Quoting the report, ‘Many of the challenges that had festered in the long-term care sector for decades-chronic underfunding, severe staffing shortages, outdated infrastructure and poor oversight contributed to deadly consequences for Ontario’s most vulnerable citizens during the pandemic”…The commission took particulate issue with long-term care homes that area owned by investors.

Negligence, insouciance, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to such a glaring public boil, one that continues to fester and ooze public disdain and contempt, for the public officials, is becoming so prevalent, in so many jurisdictions, that one has to wonder about the spikes in failures. Are they a cumulation of a kind of ho-hum tradition of attending primarily to those issues which are guaranteed to erupt in public outrage, political opposition, loss of votes and termination of governments? Are they part of the Canadian tradition of the ‘nice-guy-and-gal’ stereotype which protects many political oversights and negligence from catching fire? Are they also embedded in the decline of local reporting media, and the resulting silence, and unawareness of many public issues that really need to be addressed? Are they a part of the political landscape and culture that hold that, there are only a few prominent and politically radioactive files with which any government can be really focussed, leaving all others to ‘maybe we will get to that sometime later’ kind of thinking and acting?

When hundreds of air passengers are left sitting on a tarmac for twelve hours without food, water, or even evacuation, in a period of turbulent weather, when the responsibility for such legitimate human services are essential, none of those services were, apparently, supplied. Whether the airline or the airport, both of whose regulatory and contractual responsibilities are involved in any solution, is more or less accountable, the fact that previous arrangements for a set of circumstances that occurs in Canada on a regular winter basis, had/have not been made, and written into the contracts between airlines and airports,  is inexcuseable.

Another obvious “gap” in coverage, whether deliberate or not, whether caught between the public service of the airport or the private profit of the airline, another of those ‘intersections’ of power, the issue of ‘gaps’ seems to be one that inflicts much of our public policy and accountability.

Intersections of power and jurisdiction, however, not attended to, as was the demonstrated case in 9-11, when intelligence and national security  and criminal agencies had relevant information that was never shared with the appropriate agencies, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000, Americans, is a lesson for all governments, large and small. Gaps, for which no one and no agency can be held responsible, have surfaced, too in the responsibility for housing at the municipal level. If a person calls a mayor looking for assistance in finding a place to live, that matter is referred to the “county” which holds responsibility and authority for “housing”. Not only is there no accountability residing in the mayor’s office, but the issue is permitted to slide out of the public mind-set of the municipality.

Deferral of public responsibility, as a political weapon, seems to have been one of the legacies of the Harris government in Ontario, when maintenance of local roads, for example was transferred from the province to the municipalities. Down-loading is just another word for out-sourcing, a practice and policy that has infested the major corporations for decades, as they sought and found the cheapest labour and the fewest environmental regulations in whatever country they could find, and abuse.

Let’s start to get real with our governments; let’s stop burying our collective heads in the sand. And let’s stop turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to some of the more obvious and yet equally unacceptable gaps in public service, from our public officials.

Symptoms as lens rather than weakness...

 The last blog entry’s smorgasbord of thoughts in this space seems, on reflection, to be a mangled and over-stuffed stew…not only of information but also of emotion and anxiety. And on reflection, it is the emotions and the consternation and the anxiety and the confusion we are all going through that has to be top of mind.

The street gibberish, ‘suck it up,’ that accompanies so many irritants and frustrations and traumas that, it has become acceptable, tolerable even expected that nothing about the world’s geopolitical situation, all of it outside our individual control and influence, is not worthy of expending emotional energy even on reflection. Detachment, indifference, insouciance, and even hopelessness, are preferable, in most situations, families, and even board rooms and sanctuaries, to elevated anxiety and concern.

It is this conventional ‘wisdom’ that is under severe scrutiny here.

For three-quarters of a century, the West has been lulled into a state of mind that has been characterized by growth, optimism, new technologies, new pharmaceutical discoveries, elevated performances by athletes and entertainers, enhanced sensitivities about ‘human rights’ and equality. Celebrating diversity, acknowledging the colonial wounds, deaths and deprivations that have been inflicted on racial and ethnic and religious minorities has been a central theme of social justice and the pursuit of enhanced equality of opportunity. Access to higher education and the demonstrable reduction of rates of poverty have ear-marked a sense that western society and culture had found a way to move in the direction of what the Americans call a ‘more perfect union’ in reference to their own country.

And while resisting that epithet, most of the rest of us have tended to ride the wave of hope and optimism and the prospect that our children would and could expect to have lives that improved upon those lives of their parents and grandparents. The Cuban missile crisis, the Viet Nam war, and even the Israeli 6-day war, the Middle East conflicts, the Falklands war, the Grenada invasion, Chechnya, Georgia and then War in the Balkans and even the Al Qaeda/Al Shabab attacks, while individually and collectively unsettling, did not seem to have the combined impact that we are not only witnessing and more importantly, actually experiencing these days. WE continue to remain detached, and anxious without either the will or the ability or the opportunity to take action, except for a core or angry anarchists. And their anger seems highly local, narcissistic and nihilistic.

Such elements as the creation of the United Nations, with its multiple social and educational arms reaching out into the depth of trouble spots with aid and care, the exponential rise of the number of philanthropies reaching into the darkest and most desperate social and political emergencies, the democratizing of technology and the real-time access to events taking place around the globe, along with the multiple advances in food production and the relative stability in nuclear weapons development may have contributed to a kind of somnolence, a kind of ‘faux-security’ and even faux-smugness that has accompanied the kind of triumphalism that politicians and mass media generated and propagated for decades. Growing opportunities for trade, on the international level, were another integral component of the rising tide of ‘hope’ and ‘promise’ and human evolution. And all of this rising tide was both engendered and exploded by a mass media whose life-line consisted of corporate and political cash.

Capitalism, even moderated capitalism, needs a culture of optimism, hope, growth and the energies that both prompt and sustain sales, whether those sales be of consumer goods, new vehicles, televisions and computers, or military weaponry or the illicit, criminal infestation of the drug trade and the multi-national cartels as well as the growing human trafficking trade. And, approaching  like a small car riding the wind behind an 18-wheeler, benefiting from the wind-drag, is the spike in entrepreneurialism, that new child of capitalism, a spreading cultural fad, with a life of its own. The business model, now embracing the mega-multi-national corporations, securing components from around the world, for manufacturing and distribution where wages and energy costs offer maximum profits, extends down/out/into the ‘weeds’ of the mom-and-pop descendents, the Etsy’s the Amazons, the Shopify’s, Facebook marketplace and a myriad of others.

Transactions, as opposed to relationships, have become not merely the norm, but the definition of how people relate. And ‘what have you done for me lately?’ and ‘how to climb whatever ladder you choose’ have come to dominate the cultural landscape. Of course, there are still honourable and highly respected social service organs like the Ambulance, the Fire fighters, the police and the librarians and public schools and universities and colleges. Raw personal ambition, under the rubric ‘the end justifies the means,’ led by corporate raw ambition to compete and to win, in what is considered the ethical model of ‘the zero-sum game’ has come to dominate the landscape and the cultural mind-set.

And this methodology, so easily and glibly contained and trained by menus and lists, by cognitive-behavioural conditioning, has now found such a permanent resonance as to be relatively impossible to moderate. It is not that competition, winning and the ‘at all costs’ component of those endeavours is, by definition, evil or unworthy of either respect or retention. It is that, for such a model of not only commerce but also language and perspective to dominate the culture is to risk losing sight and consciousness of a different kind of attitude, perception and value.

In this space, I have referred to Lee Iacoca’s frustration in the 1980’s at not being able to attract the best brains from the Harvard’s and the Yale’s for the auto industry, because they were predominantly choosing Wall Street and the financial services sector, as their path to personal financial wealth. The presidents of both of those universities, in letters to Iacocca, expressed a similar view, not merely a sentiment but an actual apology, summed up in the words, “We have been teaching the wrong stuff” to our undergraduates.” Forty-plus years later, and zillions of algorithms later, with that cataract still exploding, we are, all of us around the world, trying to get out from under the low-hanging cloud of a language and a perspective and culture that values the financial “ends” far above the “human means” to the achievement of those ends.

Although Immanuel Kant  reminded us that we ought not become the means to another’s ends, we have fallen into that trap precisely and almost unconsciously. Means to ends, however, is a reductionism that renders us all ‘functions’ as opposed to persons. And the conjunction of being with doing, measured in terms of profit and loss statements, in both small and mega-corporations, leaves the complexities and the confusions and the interruptions and the hiccups of human nature not only under the microscope of employers but also under the microscope of the medical fraternity.

Lionel Tiger’s work, entitled, The Manufacture of Evil, often referenced here, has left a lasting imprint on this mind and heart. He argues that with the rise and precision of the manufacturing industry, and the elevated degree of precision expected and demanded of our machines, North American culture, at least, has fallen into the trap of demanding that human beings conform to a similarly high degree of perfection, precision and ‘quality control’…and all of this cultural and anthropological thrust directly contravenes biology and nature. Perhaps the take-over of morality and ethics based on the industrial model has taken place seemingly imperceptibly or perhaps there were individuals and organizations eager to grasp this ‘holy ring’ of perfection in their pursuit of their religious, ethical or even corporate goals.  Were there battlements erected to slow or to mitigate this wind-storm or even if they were, were they strong enough to resist this tidal wave of ‘instrumentation’ of human beings?

Some time ago, I had a face-to-face conversation, at my request, with an oncology surgeon, about the subject of treating each patient, (and doctor, and hospital staff person) as a “soul”….Reputed writers, far more wise and experienced than this scribe, have developed the notion of the pursuit of ‘soul.’

In an interview with Scott London, James Hillman, as recorded and reported on scott.london, we read these words:

London: Symptoms are so often sees as weaknesses.

Hillman: Right, so they set up some sort of medical or psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptoms may be the most crucial part of the kid…..

But when the medical becomes scientistic; when it becomes analytical, diagnostic, statistical, and remedial; when it comes under the influence of pharmacology and HMO’s--limiting patients to six conversations and those kind of things—then we’ve lost the art altogether, and we’re just doing business; industrial, corporate business. ….I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.

(The interview was adapted from the public radio series, ‘Insight & Outlook’.)

One of the obstacles to a perspective that reaches beyond the ‘transactional’ or the purposeful, or the ‘utilitarian’ or the functional, is that we have come almost to believe that everything has a direct and empirical and measureable cause. Both cause and effect are seen in literal terms, leaving out the possibility that our imaginal perspective might have a different possibility. Amid our conventional dynamic, the individual/act/word/ decision is good or bad, normal or abnormal, and those constraints are boxed into either medical or legal containers, both needing treatment and change.

Hillman’s proposition that a different perspective, one embracing a ‘soul’ for both the observer and the observed, contains and exhibits an opportunity to ‘see’ the psychology from the perspectives of one of more myths, or gods or goddesses, in whose voice and pattern the individual is embraced. Through such a lens, we might become a voice/actor of some voice derivative from our whole human culture. Such a metaphoric, even metaphysical, neo-platonic perspective does not seek instant remediation, instant treatment; nor is it based on a foundational principal that whatever symptom is being exhibited is by definition, the problem.

We are neither machines, nor are we reducible to the kind of instrumental measurement and diagnosis and precision expected of and demanded by a culture deeply immersed in such expectations.

Paul DeFatte, writing on Facebook in a piece entitled, Complexio Oppositorim (4/11/11) writes this:

Ego-bound persons quite naturally (and naively) seek to fix the problems and to resolve the tensions out of which soul is generated. The ego seeks to make things comfortingly manageable by translating everything into the literal and concrete terms with which it is familiar and which are natural to its standpoint. Unsurprisingly, most of us are unwitting ‘soul-killers’. In ‘acting out’* instead of ‘acting in,’* we slacken or collapse altogether the inner tension required for the lyre string to produce its piercing note. In repressing, on the other hand, we retreat from the tension (of the tuning peg) needed to provide the basis for music that will never be possible otherwise.

Can and will we be able to take our ‘tight-fisted’ literal, obsessive perspective and release our literal and metaphoric ‘fingers’ from such a lens and open to a more healthy, more compassionate and even more potentially ethical perspective?

There are some hopeful, green, spring-like shoots peeking through the asphalt of conventional cognitive-behavioural reductionistic psychology of the last several decades. Can this garden attract more gardeners, more fresh water and more sunlight?

**DeFatte quotes James Hillman’s Alchemical Psychololgy, p.36-7, earlier in the same piece:

Thou shalt not repress/Thou shalt not act out…On the one hand, fire (alchemically understood) will act out. It cannot be concealed…Fire insists of being visible. It does not want to be repressed…It will smolder long after the flames have died. On the other hand, desire may not be released straight into the world. The work is spoiled, say the alchemists, by direct heat. Do not let flames touch the material. Direct fire scorches, blackens the seeds…Do not act out; do not hold in.  paradox. And a double negative that suggests a via negative, a de-literalizing cancellation of both commandments. A mercurial escape from the exhausting oscillation between them. Instead of holding in or acting out, act in,. Cook in the rotundrum#, as one vessel was called, referring both to a container and to the roundness of the skull. Hold the heart inside the head by warming the mind’s reveries. Imagine, project, fantasize. Think.

#Rotundrum: psychologically, the symbol of wholeness and the archetype that expresses itself in mandala form, a pattern of order which, like a psychological view-finder marked with a cross  or a circle divided into four, superimposed on the psychic chaos so that each content falls into place and the weltering confusion is held together by the protective circle. (from ARAS.org,  The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism)

The convergence of powerlessness and desperation with a perceived order spells...???????

Proportionality, the preferred option of deferring to the majority, while the minority absorbs the loss, and prepares to ‘fight another day’ is the norm in a democracy. If and when the radical minority rises up and takes the majority hostage to its demands, and the leaders of the purported majority ‘sell out’ to those radicals, then stalemate is the new reality in the short run, and in the long run, a new pattern of both defiance and emasculation and self-sabotage emerges. And while there are not any ‘shots’ fired’ in the physical, literal way, the long-term implications of the convergence of a hot-headed, instransigent, and anarchist ‘gang’, whether on the floor of the House of Representatives, or on the streets of a modern city, with an ambitious, and grovelling opponent who seeks their compliance, redound for a protracted period.

And while this ‘model’ of  drama just played out in the U.S. Congress, there are some parallels that have different but equally significant import. Ironically, as historian Jon Meacham noted on Morning Joe on MSNBC this week, one parallel is that the Republican Party has been subjected to a similar kind of hostage-taking these days by twenty-some insubordinates as was America itself over the last few years, in that an intransigent, radical minority has held the nation hostage to its demands, since the descent of the former, now disgraced president, rode down that elevator in trump tower, to declare his candidacy for the presidency.

A similar and somewhat parallel dynamic is playing on the global stage, with the instransigent, anarchist, Putin and his allies, who together seem determined to demonstrate to the ‘west’ that their power and influence can and will be deployed irrespective of the damages that determination wreak. Contempt for the ‘west’ epitomized in contempt for Kevin McCarthy, is shared by Iran, North Korea, and other nations whose colours are only slightly less clear.

Belarus, tjos week announced a trial for its Human Rights Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Ales Bialiatski. “Mr. Bialiatski, 60, was arrested in anti-government protests in 2021, and his supporters say that Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime is trying to silence him. He is accused of smuggling cash to fund opposition activity, according to the Viasna (Spring) Human Rights Centre, which Bialiatski founded. He faces up to 12 years in prison….The Belarus leader, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, rules with an iron fist, and has in the past been described in the West as Europe’s last dictator. He has allowed the Russian leader to launch missile attacks from Belarus as part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” (Samuel Horti, BBC News, January 5, 2023)

The Moscow Times reports, January 5, 2023, “With the help of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Lukashenko cracked down on the opposition movement, jailing his critics of forcing them into exile. The Vesna trial is the first in a series of high-profile court cases due to begin in Belarus over the coming weeks, including those of several independent journalists and that of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the leader of the opposition movement who now lives in exile.”

 These notes point to the potential of Belarus joining the war in support of Russia. On December 19, 2022, in The Guardian, Pjotr Sauer writes, “Vladimir Putin has discussed closer military cooperation with his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, during a rare visit to the country, as fears grow in Kyiv that Moscow is pushing its closest ally to joint a new ground offensive against Ukraine.”

It is not only Belarus that Ukraine has to fear. This week The GZERO newsletter reports: Iranian-made drones have allowed Russia to inflict significant damage on Ukrainian cities, infrastructure, and civilians and Teheran may also soon help Russia with missiles. North Korea may be providing weapons as well.

Meanwhile, western news reports that the U.S., Germany, France are each upping their military contributions to Ukraine: (From The GZERO Newsletter) France announced its intent to supply Ukraine with several dozen ‘light battle tanks’..and the US and Germany followed suit, confirming on Thursday that they will send armoured combat vehicles to Ukraine and that Berlin will dispatch an additional Patriot. (missile defence system)

News reports in the west tend to tilt toward the contributions from western allies of Ukraine, while the Russians continue to garner both support and weapons from a small number of allies, themselves determined to undermine the power and influence of the majority of western countries.

And while people like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson nightly defame McCarthy, and  Carlson and his viewers tilt towards leaders like Orban in Hungary, (from which country Carlson has actually broadcast his diatribe), the continuing support from the U.S. for Ukraine, under the new Republican majority in the House is coming under some cloud of doubt, as McCarthy has declared ‘no blank check’ for Ukraine.

The concept of a radical, intransigent, anarchist, and potentially nihilist “mob’that represents a small minority, both in the United States and over the weekend in Brazil (while Bolsonaro is reportedly visiting Mar a Logo) having an inordinate as well as an unjustified and unjustifiable amount of power and influence, is a model that is increasingly both flexing its muscle and confounding the establishment powers on other fronts.

In Canada, the Freedom Convoy is the symbol of this intransigence, defiant as they were (and continue to be?) over issues like imposed lockdowns and masks during COVID. This gang continue to trouble authorities in Canada over how to address such open and rebellious movements. Were Emergency Measures needed to quell the protest that paralyzed Ottawa and the Ambassador Bridge, is only one question still being debated. In Florida, Governor DeSantis, in a speech this week, declared, ‘while others grinded down their people,’ Florida freed its people during COVID”…(We can hardly ignore the malaproprism or the glaring grammatical error of substituting ‘grinded’ for ‘ground’ coming from both a Yale and a Harvard Law grad.) The larger point, however, of attempting to paint Florida as the ‘non-compliant’ outlier among what by implication are the ‘weak’ and spineless majority of states who prioritized the health of their people, in an effort to garner trump cult voters, indicates the depth to which this outlier archetype has become embedded in the zeitgeist of the nation.


The public media uses depictions like ‘mob’ for the kind of language and perspective that surrounds the trump ethos, the inference being that their leader imitates the mob boss, directing others to do the dirty work and washing his hands of all responsibility and culpability. And while law enforcement concentrated on both their names and their methods, and brought many to justice, this iteration of hostage-taking, defiance, and rebellion, on the global scene has so many ugly implications as to be demanding and receiving the focused attention of governmental departments that range from the military, to national security, to foreign affairs, and even to electoral stability.

 

In the U.S., as we all know, directly from Steve Bannon, the trump cult has a primary motive to deconstruct the actual administrative structure. On Monday January 9, 2023, Bannon was recorded on his podcast saying that while the voting machines used in Brazil are different from those used in the U.S. each country has to ‘fight its own fight’ in a clear and conjunctive alliance with Brazilian insurrectionists. And, based on the multiple, nefarious, insidious and highly seductive manoeuvres that have been deployed, and have twisted at least the Justice Department into a paralyzed pretzel, regarding the ‘big names’ that lead the ‘insurrection’, it is not only fair and reasonable but essential that the Biden administration continue to monitor and adapt to the continuing threat to the stability of the nation, And the threat, while housed within, has the implicit if deceptive support from people like Putin and his allies in their active deployment of cyber-invasions.

In some ways, McCarthy’s reputed ‘sell-off’ of many of the protections of the speaker’s office and chair, in order to gain the necessary votes to become Speaker of the House, has parallels with the NATO response of scrupulous adherence to the letter of the charter of NATO, in refusing to consider Ukraine a full and legal member of NATO and thereby justifying restraint in the provision of military aid to Ukraine. Everyone knows, and Putin has publicly declared, that his ‘fight’ is with the West, and that includes NATO. And just as the trump cabal will stop at nothing in their campaign to subvert the nation’s democratic institutions, so too will Putin and his allies do whatever it takes to undermine and subvert whatever stability might be vulnerable in the West. And that includes the kind of infrastructure Russian forces are destroying in Ukraine, as well as the electoral foundational infrastructure that offers the best hope for democracy.
Unless and until NATO comes to its senses, and begins to conceive of the magnitude and the insidious and nefarious and ubiquitous nature of the
Putin ambition, this was will only grow. And every day, as Russia becomes more embroiled in the pursuit of its goals, it grows as a threat to world stability and order.

On January 3, 2023, writing on GZERO’s website, in a piece entitled, Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2023, Annie Gugliotta writes:

#1. Rogue Russia: A cornered Russia will turn from a global player into the world’s most dangerous rogue state, posing a serious and pervasive danger to Europe, the U.S., and beyond. Bogged down in Ukraine, with little to lose from further isolation and Western retaliation, and facing intense domestic pressure to show strength, Russia will turn to asymmetric warfare against the West to inflict damage through a thousand ‘paper cuts’ rather than through overt aggression that requires military and economic power Russia no longer has. Vladimir Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling will escalate. Kremlin-affiliated hackers will ramp up increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks on Western firms, governments, and infrastructure. Russia will intensify its offensive against Western elections by systematically h supporting and funding disinformation and extremism. Attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure will continue. In short Rogue Russia is a threat to global security, Western political systems, the cyberspace, and food security. Not to mention every Ukrainian civilian.

 The historic convergence of minority insurrection, war, shooting and imprisoning activists (Iran) with an establishment that is unsure of how to respond to this kind of power-grab, for the sake of power, and nothing else, whether inside a specific country or across the globe has serious implications for us all.

At the very moment when global conditions require the exercise of restraint, meeting of minds and political goals and purposes, the explosion of an insurrectionist movement that seems to have one over-riding identity: seize power from the established institutions for the sake of demonstrating that they can. Such despicable and growing political cancer seems to demand a shared and collaborative approach to neutralizing its potency.

Of course, social media is the new link that makes granular reports of insurrection and war and defiance of traditional and conventional power and authority fly through the atmosphere in real time, emboldening those seeking to take up arms to do so.

Washington, Moscow, Tehran, Kyiv and the people and the many infrastructures in Ukraine, North Korea, and potentially Taiwan are all in varying degrees, current and/or potential hot spots for violence. And the plague of violence, at both the domestic and the international level is feeding itself, in a less predictable and less rigorously researched manner than the pandemic. It is also not unreasonable to speculate on a potential, if currently hidden and undisclosed, political, cultural and desperation link between the pandemic and the spate of violence.

Global warning and climate change only add fuel to the fire of discontent, anxiety and a determined resistance to quell or forestall its own ravaging power.

None of us can ignore the racial component in all of this either.

Powerlessness, or the perceptions of powerlessness, in all of its many iterations, is a deadly, venal, and lethal white-hot ignition and furnace. And for some of us, those who are at the heart of the ignition, also seek to become its fire-fighters….and the rest of us are beholden to their various dark goals and purposes. 

Omphaloskepsis....another word for 'navel-gazing' and implications

 It is unlikely that many of us have ever encountered the word, omphaloskepsis

From vocabularly.com we read, “As funny as it may sound, omphaloskepsis is a word for being obsessed with your own navel…The Ancient Greek root words omphalos, ‘navel,’ and ‘skepsis’, ‘reflection,’ combine to make a great way of describing a tendency to be self-absorbed.”

This piece is not about a two—year-old’s fixation with his navel. It is also not about whether a conscious and critical self-reflection is relevant and important to a health sense of personal wellness.

This piece is intended as a reflection on the degree to which each of us, and each organization, and each school and university, church, town, city, province, state and especially nation is growing obsessed with the ‘branding’ of its own ‘identity. Or course, there is ample reason for making as clear as one can which kind of culture, menu of options, manner of their delivery is available to the consumer, from a business organization. And, from a marketplace perspective, consumers need to know which model of fridge, stove, furnace, auto has which options, what kind of reviews, and what price one is expected to pay for any proposed transaction.

However, we risk losing perspective if and when we turn our gaze into a lens through which we examine and expect each of our exchanges, encounters and transactions to be rationally based on the framing of the identity of a person/organization which comes primarily from the source of that organization. Similarly, when we are reflecting on the quality of a person, a potential political candidate, for example, as to whether or not s/he is worthy of support, questions of ‘identity’ must be far more nuanced, complex and ‘rounded’ (to borrow a literary criticism term, differentiating between round and flat characters in a play or novel.) Marketing, selling, soliciting support, campaigning, and the language and protocols that attend that process, are by definition, as narrow, self-inflating and reductionistic as the market expects and demands.

Colleges and universities have increasingly been expected to ‘market’ their services to foreign students, as a source of new revenue. Naturally, the Canadian ‘ethos’ and traditional reputation of the country as cold, but friendly, and welcoming to immigrants and refugees will be included as either or both a stated or am implied ‘selling feature’. Reputations among researchers, in specific fields, will also be among the pieces of information that recruiters, message-designers and admissions officers will focus on as a language path to the sale. And for this purpose, some serious internal examination, collection and curation of data is normal and necessary.

Similarly, researchers in labs of whichever disciplines, will have focused their study on a specific null hypothesis, for the purpose of disproving that thesis, as they follow the discipline of scientific discovery. The study of previous propositions in their field will also inform their design. And this process of disciplining one’s ‘gaze’ for professionals, and for corporations seems reasonable and warranted.

It is, however, the question of a manner of considering the matters that come before what is coming to be known as the ‘public square’ that navel-gazing has its most serious and constricting impact. And the public square is a complex, multilayered, multi-interest, equation that attempts to respect the widest number of interests with the contentment of the largest number of people as its long-term ideal focus.

The question of the scale and the dimension of the public square, however, is undergoing such a dramatic transformation, that from the town square of many towns in Europe and North America where statues of prominent local personages are often built, and remain for centuries, to the public square that now embraces all of the capitals and nations of the world. We are not only living in a post-truth world, we are also living in a post-parochial world in spite of the valiant and seemingly heroic efforts to retain the ‘local’ is everything we think and do.

A few decades ago, there was a popular slogan among some institutions, “act local, think global,” that attempted to balance the local and the global. Cute and cliché though it was, it has apparently been washed away with the tidal wave of both technology and a degree of personal omphaloskepsis at the same time that philanthropy and global trade have exploded.

What has not expanded, however, is the spread of ideas, including political strategies and structures not only to embrace the new frontier of issues confronting the whole world, but to seek collaborative approaches to those issues. The current omphaloskepsis that has ensnared the Republican Party, over the question of a matter of what historically has been considered a house-keeping chore of selecting a Speaker of the House of Representatives, did not achieve front-page headlines overnight.

This epic and tragic omphaloskepsis is, in a word, a canary in a coalmine, in which we are all living. Money, consumer goods, oil, gas, and military materiel fly around the globe with both alacrity and increased transportation services, some of them actually breaking under the weight of their volume. New pipelines, new freight carriers, sleeker and more fuel-efficient planes, and a new internet that beams these digits into the farthest corners of the globe, the moment I upload them, is, however, not so much ‘balanced’ by an increase in personal autonomy, but rather an increase in abdication of the shared responsibility among all people and all nations for our shared future.

The media, and the political class, together, even if not in a deliberate and purposeful conspiracy, are increasingly encased in a mind-set, along with both protocols and previous legislation and traditions that, not only no longer work but that actually subvert the pressing needs and demands of a new era. And while tradition and history have a legitimate role in each of our histories, both personal and national/ethnic/religious/cultural, the limits of their role have not been defined, curtailed and removed as obstructions to the new reality,

All politics is local, is just one of the cliché’s that, while identifying the basic premise that all votes from neighbours and businesses on the same streets in the same towns and townships in which the elected official resides, nevertheless, has more clout that is reasonable, given the many other attributes of a political party and candidate, including policy, philosophy, vision and commitment. These larger, or more esoteric, or more abstract, or more ‘intellectual’ aspects of a political campaign, must not be permitted to atrophy or even disappear under the guise of ‘protecting’ our local traditions.

And the mind-set and the attitude that clings to the ‘local’ candidate over the one who has appropriate and needed policies and ideas to make both the constituency and the state and nation better, is not merely provincial, it is essentially, political omphaloskepsis…navel gazing, just as the hostage-taking of the Republican Party by two dozen anarchists, models.

A similar kind of omphaloskepsis, although much more critical with international implications, whether the men and women who sustain its grip on the American political class, is the U.S. refusal to become a signatory to the International Criminal Court. Rationalized under the flimsy excuse that, to sign on would expose American military and diplomatic personnel to the same scrutiny under law as other nations, just does not fly, in a world in which thousands of men, women and children are dying under the specific orders of the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin. And this war, itself, is another example of omphaloskepsis, on the part of Putin and his Russian sycophants. It is not so much that America and Russia are not enemies, but that they are both deeply enmeshed in a kind of polity and perspective that not merely shapes national perspective, buy corrodes and precludes national potential.

What are the underlying motivations, conscious and unconscious, for the dynamic of omphaliskepsis?

The most obvious, is that the world as far as we can see, is amenable to control to the degree to which we require it to be. Not only on its face, but in its full perspective, that is utterly inconceivable. Drawing a line around the world in terms of our ability and willingness and capacity to control it, is fanciful, fantasy and self-sabotage in the extreme. The two-year-old fixated on his belly-button is merely exploring his body and his new world. Similarly, the atomic microscope in the research lab is detecting the components and the movements and the relationships between and among the item under study with other items. There is a legitimacy to those respective pursuits. Applied to the national interest, whether as imitation of or as defence from another nation’s omphaloskepsis, however, it evaporates under clear-eyed scrutiny.

Another potential motivation for this dynamic might be national pride, nationalism, and the building up of the hopes and the dreams and the aspirations of the people of any nation. And while national and personal pride are both welcome and necessary, to a limited degree, hubris, in the service of both personal mental health and national status and respect, fails both the person and the nation. And, there is no denying that omphaloskepsis directly and indirectly contributes to the risk of hubris, at home and abroad. And the implications of the simple phrase, “Number One” emblazoned on the hearts and minds of any people, or religion, or ideology or culture, or even an auto manufacturer or pharmaceutical company, or certainly a candidate for the presidency, (think “I alone can fix this!”).

There is a qualitative difference between omphaloskepsis and narcissism. The former brings about some potential self-reflection on the narrowness of one’s perspective, and perhaps even the option of extending the range of vision to include a more complex, nuanced, and interesting and imaginative perspective, on the way to a global perspective. National navel gazing, also, is not a psychiatric or psychological diagnosis. Narcissism carries the connotative freight of a mental defect. It is not incidental to note the prominence of the word narcissist, as one of the more insidious fixations of the social media, rendering everyone access to the false and dangerous perspective of a psychological professional, a qualification none of us holds or is authorized to hold. And the very dependence on the vocabulary of mental defective, from those of us who have no legitimacy to deploy such radioactive words, screams both omphaloskepsis and a degree of dismissal of those we do not like or know.

In Canada, the dynamic of omphaloskepsis can readily be seen in the national government’s public stance on reconciliation with the indigenous population. Public, persistent and proud proclamations of ‘making things right’ with indigenous people, in an attempt to right centuries of colonization, contempt and downright racism, while generating a media blitz of headlines, conferences, and the like, all of it coming from a place of acknowledged national shame, without actually making real the necessary changes both in law and in practice to move in the direction of reconciliation, smacks of timid and tepid commitment at best, and deceit and delay at worst.

Hypocrisy of political parties and actors, is also different from omphaloskepsis. The former is so deeply embedded in the cultural memory and imagination, and readily separated from the daily lives of the ordinary people. Omphaloskepsis, on the other hand, applies to everyone everywhere, and is not and cannot be restricted to the attitudes and behaviours of only the political class. Hypocrisy is also universal, but navel-gazing seems so much more pedestrian, almost incidental and less loaded with negative freight.

If we are all engaged in a process, omphaloskepsis, and we can all open our minds and our hearts to the implications of gazing at our collective navel, is it possible  in that we might shift our gaze from our narrow, personal, familial, neighbourhood, parochial, and national fixation and begin to embrace a new perspective?

    Can we begin to envision a world in which nations realize that self-interest is no longer the solitary or even the primary interest of each national government?

    Can we begin to envision an international series of bodies, institutions, designed, created and empowered that can and do represent the interests not only of rich and militarily powerful countries, but of the single mother scratching out an existence in a hovel in Africa, as equally important, and equally subject to the ravages of global warming and climate change as a universal existential threat?

    Can we envision an international media, representing the writers and the perspectives of at least the major ethnicities and cultures, in the spirit and design of addressing the multiple complex yet universally shared threats to respectable, dignified, and sustainable human existence, for the benefit of everyone?

    Can we envision both the philanthropic and the corporate and the academic and governmental ‘establishments’ in each nation coming to accept the respective responsibility and surrender of some of what is commonly referred to as autonomy or sovereignty, depending on the locus, in order to manifest and to design and then to build a shared , sustainable and stable future for our grandchildren?

    Can we begin to realize how dry, uininteresting and unimaginative our own ‘navel’ is in light of the variety, and stimulation and creativity that a wider, more receptive and more courageous ‘personal, national “lens” offers?